The 3 plus 3 Viral Marketing Management Tips
Traditional marketing and viral marketing are two different fish in a very large ocean. Where traditional marketing has a start – finish, cost – return on investment (ROI); viral marketing has a start and cost but no finish and a difficult to determine ROI.
To plan for a viral marketing campaign, you need to be determined and prepared to take the good with the bad. There are however, three mindsets that need to be clarified prior to starting and three actions that require careful management.
Mindsets:
- Viral Marketing does not have a timeline: As I have already mentioned, viral marketing has prospective start date but no end date.
- Success bares no relation to investment:It is very difficult to determine ROI on a viral marketing campaign. However many campaigns can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a standard marketing campaign.
- Don’t rely on stats for reach or impact: The online community is fickle so, whilst your stats may only show a marginal increase in traffic, hundreds or thousands may be discussing you or your products withing social sites. This may cause a trickle of traffic that will slowly increase over time. Not all viral campaigns lead to tidal waves of traffic. Accept the occasional king tide.
Accepting that viral marketing is difficult to measure and does not always deliver floods of responses, the following areas need to be carefully managed to capitalize on what responses are received. Failing to prepare can kill off a viral campaign as quickly as it gets started.
Management
- Innovate and Experiment: Be prepared to experiment using all technologies available. These include blogs, videos, podcasts, the social web and different styles of ad units. As you are experimenting, be prepared for failures. If one method is not working then pull it quickly and move on to another method.
- Listen and learn: Become active within the various social networks and spend time listening to what is being said. If your product or name starts to get mentioned, watch to see which target groups are talking. You can fine tune future campaigns by knowing who is prepared to talk about you.
- Engage, respond and act: if your viral marketing campaign does go into overdrive be prepared to participate fully. If negative fire-spots start jump in and water them down. If traffic arrives in their hundreds, be prepared to answer their needs.
The last point is one of the most crucial. I have seen campaigns designed to get newsletter sign-ups go horribly wrong simply because their database had not been set up to handle the number of responses. I have seen other campaigns where the site owner was not ready to handle the number of questions thrown at them.
With any campaign, remember the 5 P’s – prior planning prevents poor performance. This extremely true when it comes to viral marketing. The campaign may appear to be going badly, the minute you drop your guard, it will take off. Murphy’s law.
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