You may be thinking that viral marketing techniques are only for the major players
with big budgets, and that it can not work for small businesses with small budgets.
If that is your thinking, I can assure you, you are wrong. You might not be able to
afford to produce the highly polished ads like the big companies, but there are still a
lot of opportunities for success. Any business or individual with a message to get out
or a service or product to sell can benefit from a well crafted marketing campaign.
There are several reasons that you should be using viral traffic generation techniques
to build your business and attract customers to your website.
It is a fast, effective way to drive traffic to your site.
Like I mentioned above, once the word starts to spread, it can spread very quickly,
and there is really no limit to how many people can hear your message. Because
your message often comes to someone from a person they already know, it has
more credibility than if the message showed up uninvited in an email from someone
they do not know.
Once the message starts to spread it picks up size and speed as it goes, like a
snowball rolling down a hill. You may start out thinking that your efforts were not
very effective, then one morning you open your email to find it full of new orders.
When it works, it can work very fast.
It can be very inexpensive.
Once the word starts to spread, there is not much additional cost. The biggest cost
you will face is paying for all the additional traffic to your site. All of the cost and
effort of spreading the word about what you have to offer is taken care of by the
people spreading the word. More than likely, the biggest expense will be the upfront
set up or production costs. Depending on which technique you decide to use. After
that initial expense, the cost remaining costs are nominal.
It can help shield you from negative comments
One thing to remember is that a negative message can go viral, too. Unfortunately,
you are not going to be able to please everyone. If you do enough business,
eventually you are going to have someone who is unhappy with you and your
business. It only takes one customer that is dissatisfied to put a shadow of doubt in
your customer’s minds about whether they should do business with you or not.
Once that doubt is there, it is hard to remove it. If people are not happy with the
service they received, they are more likely to tell people about it than if they are
happy customers.
As unhappy customers start spreading negative messages about you, the word will
start to spread, and there is not much you can do to stop it. The more it spreads,
the more untrustworthy your business appears. All you can do is have enough of a
buffer in place that the negative messages do not overpower the positive messages.
If your message goes viral, not only will is send a flood of traffic to your site, but
other sites will link to you, and your site will rank higher in the search engines. Your
name will also appear on other high ranking sites. If a negative message does start
to go around, it will have a much harder time getting out, because your positive
message is already so highly ranked that the negative messages can not find their
way to the top of the search engine listings.
It can find hidden customers.
Despite the time and money you spend trying to narrowly define your customers,
figuring out who they are, and more importantly, where they are, there will always
be people that you have missed. Once your message goes viral, there is no telling
where it will end up, or who will see it. Because of the widespread coverage that can
occur, people that you had not even considered to be your customers will get a
chance to see your message. They will decide whether they are potential customers
or not.
As word continues to spread about what you are offering, you do not have to worry
about finding all the possible niches your customers might be hiding. You do not
have to go find them, they will find you.
viral list crusher