If you have been online for long enough then there is a chance that you have heard of viral marketing. If you are looking to generate quick traffic that is prolific then this is probably the way to go. You should know from the beginning that this is not the easiest of traffic generation tactics but it is worth considering. Nowadays, online communities and social media have an avenue that allows people to share the content concerning their business, products, and services. This therefore means that viral marketing is a way that you can consider to increase the overall amount of traffic to your site.
How it works is that your marketing campaign will generate a significant amount of sales and leads through viral campaigning. In most cases, if viral marketing is properly utilised, then it can become very productive and positive. One of the best ways to encourage people to share or forward a given message to their friends is by offering some sort of incentive. This does not necessarily need to be an expensive incentive, you can even offer services such as a free business plan as a pdf download.
Capturing Contact Information
There are various ways in which you can use to disseminate your marketing message however it is vital that you have a clear objective prior to starting to spread the message. The most crucial objective in as far as viral marketing is concerned is to capture the information. To be honest, gathering a list of emails is a very effective tool for viral marketing even more important than making sales. The reason behind this is that with viral marketing the message will reach a great number of people who will probably have never heard of you and as a result will be very reluctant to part with their money as compared to submitting their contact information.
Soon after collecting their emails you will be in a better position to market to them and build a relationship such that you are able to convert these subscribers to customers.
A Message with a Free Offer
Now that you have an objective for drawing in new prospects you are better prepared for an exponential growth. However, you need to provide your potential customers with something in exchange for capturing their contact information. You should begin by writing an articulate article that is freely accessible and in PDF format. Generally people are drawn to good content therefore you need to be interesting, succinct and informative. You should aim to use this content to market your products or website and then encourage potential customers to purchase your products whenever they visit your site. You should avoid having an extremely marketing tone or pitch in the article as this may put off some of the readers. It would be advisable that as you offer this free product, you make it such that they can only receive the product by email. This will go a long way in eliminating the scepticism by the individual of asking “why is this person requesting for my email?”
Write a teaser
One of the most effective ways that you can use in marketing an e-book is to give a brief sample of what the content within the book is about. Similarly, you should provide a simple description of the article or of the products and services that you intend to provide with the intention of generating interest. The result of this is that there will be an increase in the amount of traffic to your website.
Make an offer for an Incentive in return for spreading the word
This is where viral marketing really shows its power. Within the free product (e-book or free email) you should consider to include a segment where they can refer your products to a friend. Here they will only be required to put in the details of the friend that they think will appreciate the free offer. In return for the referral you should offer some sort of reward which can be another e-book or a report of the same kind and if it is within your power, a free software. Needless to say, you will need to automate your systems such that it automatically sends the free reward to anyone who refers a friend as doing this manually would be too cumbersome. Some of the best tools to perform this task would be OmnistarTell, ViralFriendGenerator and TellaFriendPro.
By having a form of incentive for your prospective clients who are successfully inviting then you will have a genuinely powerful marketing machine that can be used for viral marketing that will be self-sustaining.
Share your message on Different Media
Once your viral marketing system is fully automated, you need to consider attracting some traffic to your landing page. An effective way of achieving this is with the help of multiple forms of media such as press releases, videos, articles and podcasts. On the face of this it appears like it can be a tad bit involving. However, remember that you can spread one message by coming up with a video and have the same message be repurposed to come up with an article and a press release. In this message you might want to consider offering something like a free course that will persuade people to subscribe to your mailing list.
Soon after achieving this, you should immediately jump on the chance to offer your new subscribers a chance to invite their friends.
Expand your Campaign by Using a Contest
Once you have completed the above steps, you can proceed to exploding your campaign with the help of a contest. Simply offer an attractive prize to the subscriber that is able to refer the most number of people. Yes you may be required to make a small investment on the prize simply because the more appealing it is the more likely the marketing campaign will achieve the status of viral. Also you might want to consider offering a prize for those who achieve the second and third positions.
It is worth noting that you need to make sure that your articles and posts are relatively easy to share. It would be a waste of time to go through all this trouble and your content is difficult to share.