MediaVidea

10 Viral Marketing tools

1. Useful, entertaining Microsites: Centered on a concept, new product or service or a special service for your customers.

2. Online games/quizzes/polls: Flash games are very popular at the moment. Many sites often carry these games and polls on a Microsite (which you clearly advertise) versus a Pop up (which surprises and annoys people, especially if you don’t inform them about the pop up status)

3. Video clips: The in-thing in this age of video sites such as Youtube. Produced for anything between free and $50000 and upwards on a cellphone or on full-fledge sound stage.

Viral videos are the third most effective tool for Viral marketing, according to a study by MarketingSherpa.com, behind Microsites and Online games, quizzes and polls.

However, you must keep in mind that most videos don’t go viral. In fact, many of the successful viral videos have been that individuals create instead of corporations. Besides, the effectiveness of specially produced Viral Video may also suffer from over use, having to compete with others; often you will find yourself spending money to spread the message about your $50,000 viral video.

Marketing Sherpa says that 10% of people who see a video will ell others about that clip,

Check out this Wikipedia entry cum list of Viral marketing campaigns.

4. Audio clips: In form of podcasts, song clip., etc

5. Tell a friend feature on web sites: Heavily used by Web 2.0 startups.

6. Encouraging e-mail forwarding: News sites thrive on it.

7. Offering e-cards and special ‘cool-looking’ single page, easy-to-download (that is, not heavy) documents.

8. Refer-a-Friend: A staple of social networking sites, including Digg.

9. Free tools and Widgets: Seomoz.org’s SEO tools are very popular.

10. Community marketing: Actually, it is an alternative to Viral marketing methods. Jeremiah Owyang says that Viral campaign is like getting ‘digged’ – a initial spike and then back to normal. Rather, as Jeremiah suggests is to nurture a community which will eventually deliver your business compounded growth year after year.

There are no short cuts to business success.

If you succeed in satisfy at least a small group of customers, they will speak about you to many others. Isn’t this Viral marketing or what?

Your core group of users/customers: those are the ones who pay attention. Of course, people selling alcoholic beverages, movies and all that involves huge back-end expenditure usually forget this and go for short cuts.

According to Jeremiah,

Viral Marketing effort that will be like the ‘pet rock’ of the 80s.

Update:
Jeremiah has this great list of Online marketing tools, worth checking out.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, research report, viral marketing

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:13 PM