One in five of businesses that advertise online will try viral marketing this year. Here's what you need to know to join them.
Viral marketing, buzz marketing, stealth marketing -- the names vary, but its popularity is undeniable. JupiterResearch polled 273 U.S. advertisers in April 2006 and found that one in five of those that advertise online will try viral marketing in the coming year. The examples and advice here can help you join them.
But first, what is it? At its core, viral marketing is information customers want coupled with a friction-free way to share it. Because it's inexpensive and leverages a company's unique expertise, it's a good fit for many small and medium-sized businesses.
Content: Useful and Sharable
Take Customer Chemistry, a 60-employee firm that improves marketing programs through "predictive analysis" -- that is, careful mathematical study. Its services aren't cheap, and yet the company offers some of its valuable intellectual capital through several free channels, including newsletters, webcasts, articles, and white papers. The goal, says vice president of modeling and analytics Chris Checco, is to build the company's credibility, reputation, and brand through the sharing of this content.
Free content can mean videos, podcasts, Web logs (blogs), e-newsletters, documents, and even games. Regardless of medium, successful examples are original, useful, honest, and often entertaining. Content should be fresh, easy to share, and reflective of your company's particular knowledge.
Your audience needs to find you and your free content, but you can also bring your knowledge to your audience using online communities.
Community: The Next Wave
Message boards, forums, and other online venues feature user-generated content, discussion, and problem-solving. As recently as 2005, text-based forms predominated, but new online communities feature user-generated multimedia content and a richer interactive experience. MySpace and YouTube are headline-grabbing examples of this "social networking", or focused vertical venues that are appearing.
For example, Edmunds Automotive Network, a 400-employee media company that runs the car-information website Edmunds.com, launched CarSpace in February 2006. CarSpace lets members post photos and videos of their rides and create networks of friends. It already boasts 35,000 members -- and company research shows that they are different from those who use Edmunds' text-based message boards. "They tend to be younger, and they don't want to be heavily marketed to in a way that's overt and in-your-face," says Matthew Kumin, executive vice president of Edmunds Media. "They want to communicate in a way that is ultimately truthful. That's going to be the next wave of marketing."
Best Practices
- Participate, don't sell. In online communities, invest time learning local customs, providing honest advice, and building your reputation. JupiterResearch says more than 70% of viral marketers want to raise awareness, compared with 44% who hope to generate off-line sales. Online communities punish marketers who lie or pour on the sales pitch. "When that happens, you're one blog post away from being ripped into," Kumin warns.
- Make it measurable and accountable. Customer Chemistry's free content, for example, is carefully tracked. "A white paper may have 12 different names and be available through six different channels," says Checco. Studying different responses "paints a roadmap of where you want to market, and more important where you don't want to market. It's a statistical way of throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks."
- Be easy to find. Invest in search-engine optimization SEO, which makes your Web site easy for the search sites to discover and catalog. More than 90% of Internet users in the U.S. use a search site to find information, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
- Ask customers to help. It's as simple as adding, "Did you enjoy this? Share it with a friend." Make helping effortless -- emailing, linking, and forwarding should be a one-click operation. The more customers link to, blog about, and discuss your company, the easier it will be for your next customer to find you. Which is, ultimately, the goal of any marketing program.
Fred Sandsmark writes for Cisco Systems.
