Viral Marketing for Small Business - Business

In the old days of marketing, say 20 years ago, you developed a nice brochure and took out print ads, and hoped that someone would buy your product. Fast forward to 2011, and marketers are using video and social networks to spread the news as print media is dying. The goals of marketing have not changed, but the internet has made it a whole lot easier to spread the word about what you are selling. As a small business, you'd better go viral with your marketing if you want to be successful.

Viral marketing sounds like a virus, and in fact, the concept is the same. Seth Godin, who has studied this concept in a series of popular books and articles, calls it an "Idea Virus." You want your potential buyers to catch word of your product as if it were the common cold and spread it to everyone they know, with the hope that this new group of contacts will spread the word to their friends. And so on. While word of mouth has always been figured into promotional strategies, now it is the main one.

Your challenge as a small business marketer is to present your message in a way that people will want to spread it. Even if you think your product or service is the greatest in the world, your words are not as effective as those of satisfied customers. You strive to create those. But how? As marketing guru Josh Bernoff has pointed out, you need to create a message that will spread and have a strong product message included. You present your message in memorable way that often includes a visual element.

Think about Geico commercials. Running alongside their popular line of ads that features a gecko with personality as the spokesperson, they also have some ads more based in pop culture. In a recent ad that features a keyboard playing dog and a singing bird, a viewer takes away the clear message that Geico insurance saves you money. How much? Well, maybe enough that you could have an 80's rock band at your disposal instead of this makeshift duo. Ridiculous, yes! Effective, even more so. The video of this commercial has had 103,511 hits on You Tube. According to Warren Buffet, who owns Geico's parent company, the ads have embedded the concept of Geico and affordable rates in peoples' minds. He believes that 40% of the people who call the company buy the product.

Viral marketing often includes a "gimmick" that induces the consumer to listen and interact. In the ad we mentioned, it is the bird and the dog. In many other cases, it is an offer of a free report or something else that the viewer might consider to be of value. Your goal is to get the traffic and turn it into buyers, based on your email campaigns, and your social media. Even if your brand does not become a household word, you can built it through an approach that incorporates many of the techniques of viral marketing.

We will examine these special techniques in a future blog, but remember this: your goal is to get people talking about your product and then taking the next step. Regardless of your product or service, how can you get your name on the radar of your target audience? Even if you aren't Geico with potential customers in every household, viral marketing is the way to promote your small business.