Viral Marketing and List Building Tips

Viral marketing is a fairly new medium, and lots of people are making mistakes. Before you launch a campaign that doesn’t produce or taints your brand, remember viral marketing can be difficult, and it pays to learn the basics before you launch a campaign on your own. In the spirit of helping you and your company succeed, today we will review 3 common mistakes made by viral beginners and give you some advice on how to avoid them.

1 – Alienating Your Audience

Alienating your audience is a common viral mistake. People want to get noticed and may cross the line with hopes that no one will take offense. Go too far, however, and your plan will backfire.

Let’s look at a fairly recent Motrin viral ad. The company’s intent was to demonstrate the fashionable trend of carrying one’s child is hard on a mother’s back, and that Motrin can be used to alleviate the pain. It sounds innocent enough, but an online community of mothers resented the suggestion that they were carrying their babies around as fashion accessories. What happened? The ad received tons of negative feedback and damaged the Motrin brand.

The lesson here is to keep the consumer in mind, no matter what. While this rule may seem elementary, it is violated time and time again by marketers new and old. Don’t be one of them.

2 – Failing to Associate your Brand with the Message

Measuring the success of a viral campaign is complicated. Traditional ROI models simply don’t apply. Goals of viral campaigns vary, but may include things like page views, comments, sign-ups, and trackbacks, none of which directly equate to dollars. At the same time, just because a message goes viral does not mean the campaign was a success.

Because of these factors, the main goal of any viral campaign is brand awareness, and the benefit of branding virally is the potential impact of reaching scores of people in a very short period…but you must do it right. This means making sure your viral content is in line with your brand equity.

There have been recent campaigns, like this one from Gatorade, that went viral but still failed because advertisers neglected to associate the content with the brand, and the brand gained little traction. Learn from Gatorade’s mistake and your chances of viral success dramatically improve.

3 – Making a TV Commercial, Not a Viral Video

Many beginners tend to believe any video can go viral, and in theory, this may be true. While there are commercials that have gone viral, if you try to go viral with your own, odds are it won’t work. This is because people don’t like commercials! Moreover, with the popularity of TiVo and DVR, audiences are used to skipping commercials entirely.

The lesson here? Make sure your video pulls the audience in and compels them to watch. You can create stakes with humor, shock, or a tug on the heart strings. This Dove commercial went viral because it tugged on the emotional chords of the viewers. No matter what you do, however, give your viral video an interesting angle or risk being simply ignored.

Creating a viral marketing campaign is not as easy as uploading a video on YouTube. Be

Stop with the enforced e-mail forwards already! Trying to force or bribe people to forward your info to a friends or family in order to be rewarded or win looks skanky in today’s ultra-permission-based world. Especially when you tell visitors nothing about their friend’s or family’s privacy in the space directly next to the e-mail form.

A true viral campaign gets forwarded because consumers are compelled to do so by the glory of the content, not because you bribed them with points or something else.

What absolutely will not work:

Suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and family will not work. Adding a line at the bottom of your e-mail that reads “Please feel free to forward this message to a friend” is more likely to get it deleted than forwarded.

What absolutely will work:

Offering something worthy of sharing like a valuable discount, vital information or offering an incentive for sharing like additional entries into a sweepstakes or an added discount or premium service will work.

Relevant or timely information, research, or studies that are included in your e-mail might encourage the recipients to share with their family and friends. Interactive content like a quiz or test, especially if it’s fun, will inspire forwarding.

Jokes and cartoons are almost always forwarded to everybody the recipient knows. Why? Because they are entertaining and entertainment is meant to be shared.

A really cool multimedia experience is always going to achieve a lot of pass-along. Rich media is new and the novelty and tech factors alone are often enough to make the e-mail recipient eager to share it. Oops! Almost forgot one really important thing….You can craft a brilliant e-mail following all the rules, but if a consumer visits your site and has an experience less that what was promised, you are going to achieve viral marketing, alright…the bad kind. So be certain that your product or service is ready and is as advertised.

In order to be successful using forums to do viral marketing there are some things that are required.

Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research.

1. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many types of forums could apply….everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home moms.

2. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this.

3. Choose forums that allow sig tags. If it’s possible read the rules before joining and pay attention to them. Your time is important, too. It is better to find out that a forum doesn’t allow posts with sig tags before you go to the time and trouble of joining.

After You Have Joined: OK…you have chosen two or three forums that meet your requirements…now what?

1. Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. 2. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This all but a universal rule and only displays the marketers lack of experience if he does so. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors….at worst, it is grounds for being banned. 3. Work the room. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there and take the time to get to know the users. Take the time to introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic. As a marketer becomes a regular member, they will hopefully develop a good reputation and without saying a word about their promotion, those who are interested in their product will approach them.

Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It is, also, a powerful way to generate traffic to your website.

Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.

Now let’s look at using an eBook to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an eBook… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

Before you know it the eBook is spreading across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free eBook.

Make certain that you let people know that they have permission to forward the eBook around the Internet. When you create the eBook, you have the right to give people certain rights. One of those rights could be that you allow them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away.

You can write the eBook yourself, use private label content or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are a lot of ways to create an eBook. Once you have your eBook written, use software to create your eBook.