Viral campaigns - Putting all the pieces together

Viral campaigns are great on so many levels. It is essentially, in it's truest form, a word of mouth campaign, and is potentially the cheapest, most effective marketing tool you can have.

Yes, you can hire an agency, or in Ooma's case, Ashton Kutcher, to run your viral campaign, but you can also have a very successful viral campaign for as cheap as around a thousand bucks. So even rogue entrepreneurs can take advantage of this marketing method.

So what are some of the best practices, you can use in your viral marketing campaign? I did a major search on the web to highlight some of the best practices out there.

Putting together a viral campaign, ask yourself the same questions you need to define when generating any other solid marketing plan:

Why
What is the campaign goal or goals you are trying to achieve and at the end of the campaign, how can you measure your success (ROI) If your goal is to increase awareness, then web traffic metrics should suffice, but if your goal is to increase sales make sure your are including some trackable means (surveys, coupons, sales from traffic from a specific micro site or tag). Other goals can include a customer taking a specific action, like playing a game, etc.

Who
Who are your market segment / target audiences? Are your market segments oriented on: Sex? The health of the environment? Video Games? Advice on raising children? Hip Hop? How well you know your market will determine what type of viral campaign to run.

What
What content, promotion, experience, activity or discount would be compelling enough to excite your target audience to make them care about your campaign to make it go wildly viral and forward it onto others? Some examples include: An online game or activity, coupon or exclusive discount, valuable information (ex. ebook), a free product (a song or software program), a donation to a charity, personal empowerment (save a tree)

Where
Are you focusing on a specific region? or country?

How
What strategies, tactics and communication methods should you use based on your target audience?
Your activities should include as many are appropriate to your market segment and budget allows:
1) Send out an optimized press release
2) Blog seeding - strategic placement on blogs (ideally on some highly influential blogger's sites)
and offer a range of to add badges, buttons and graphics which they can add to their blog to link to your site
3) E-mails
4) Texts
5) Post in online forums or social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace
6) Radio stations
7) You Tube videos
etc.

When
Timed with a launch or other event? Expected lifespan of campaign. And if you find your viral campaign has done really well but it's effectiveness is slowing down, one option is to send out a press release announcing it's success to re-kindle the buzz

Some great sites to check out for more info:
Marketing Sherpa
Tips for Optimizing Viral Marketing Campaigns
Viral & Buzz Marketing Association

The upstream lifecycle of emails (aka why e-mails are like salmon)

The uphill battle of our e-mail lifecycles

There are so many challenges we face, as marketers in order to make a successful e-mail campaign happen. We spend a lot of time, thought, money and energy building something we deem to be a great e-mail.
Next we send it out to our database list (all opt in of course!) , which we have carefully crafted and defined in order to maximize our reach of our chosen market segments. And here is where the e-mail lifecycle starts to face it's fight for it's life.

The salmon run parallel

An e-mail lifecycle shares a lot of parallels with salmon and their mating challenges. In order to mate, a salmon's goal is to swim upstream, get past such hazards as bears and other predators, diseases and water hazards, then find a mate and consummate the relationship. E-mails must electronically also swim upstream, get past spam blockers, stand out in over packed e-mail boxes, avoid getting randomly deleted and get the customer to open the e-mail and call out a clear call to action, a solution message, or even provide some information the customer deems valuable in order to successfully accomplish its goal, the click through. Don't you just love metaphors?

Carefully crafted databases and following the rules of e-mail protocol will help you get those e-mails into the actual inbox. This is all process oriented and not very creative really. Besides just because you have managed to get the e-mail in their box does not mean that once they open it, they will click through. This is where the actual e-mail content, design and function itself is critical. I have seen e-mails that are so overwhelming that I generally delete it immediately. I have also seen poor formatting come through, which means they didn't test the e-mail to make sure it translated correctly. My favorites and the ones that seem the most successful are simple and clean, great graphics and clearly focus on no more that 3 solutions and have clear call to actions.

There are of course, exceptions to this rule. Most online media websites will list a variety of teasers to articles and products on their websites. In most cases the goals of these e-mails are to get click through and acquire customer interaction.

An award winning e-mail

Once such media e-mail that I recently found and found aesthetically pleasing considering how many ranges of topics (music types) they were trying to cover. Ideally, it would be great if Sirius Satellite Radio could clearly identify what specific music genres customer were listening to and narrow down the length of the e-mail, but overall I think it is a nice clean design and it even won an Internet ad award.

Making your website interactvive and fun for your customers

Any good online marketing program can get traffic to your site, but once they get to your website, how to you make them want to stay?

In addition to a great site design, friendly user interface, well worded product detail pages, flash demos and product/customer solution selector tools, there are more things you can do to make your website stand out amongst the rest, keep them coming back, and increase their chances of telling friends about your site.

Of course, what additional features you decide to add to your website depend on whether you are focusing on b2b or b2c, and more specifically who your target audiences are.
In this blog I want to focus more on b2c, the consumer.

Now keep in mind that the goal of adding additional features is not to turn your website into an arcade, unless of course, your target audiences are kids and teenagers. The goal I recommend focusing on is adding interactivity into your website.

These activities should:

+ Help customers learn about your product in a fun way
+ Add to the voice of an online community made up of customers and potential customers
+ Encourage return visits to your site
+ Make them want to forward your site to friends

Some of the ideas out there that seem to be effective out on the world wide web are:

Kitchy Games -
My favorite are the kitchy ones that are simple like magic 8 ball, or fortune cookies. You can customize what the responses are.

Give away virtual product virally-
Hire a developer to turn one or several of your products into virual objects that can be used in virtual worlds like SIMs or Second Life. Let these potential cusotmers download these virual products from your website for free.
Imagine if you have a cool product like designer lamps, and a 'Second Life' user, comes to your site to download a virtual version of your products to use in their virual environment as part of their decor. Then they tell all their friends. etc.

Message Boards / Community Blogs / Virtual Chat rooms -
Set up a forum for your customers or potential customers to communicate and bond. Also it is really important to allow at least some level of customization photos, wallpaper, quotes, participation ranking. The more personalization a person can do to their online environment, increases their potential for loyalty to the product and also increase the average number of return visits. Also, it would be good to create a special exclusive forum for a "black belt community" or "inner circle elite group". Like frequent flyer miles allow you to special airline club privilledges, or belonging to any other special club, once you have proved your worth, you get exclusive access to special offers. It is critical to make these people feel extra special, they are your on the street product evangelist, viral cheerleeders and most importantly they are the innovators who reach the early adopters.


You can find examples of these suggested options through out the web. If you have the technical funds or staff you can have any of these ideas customized specifically to your target audiences, however if you are on a limited budget, you can also get generic versions of most of these for free or a low cost.

Taking care of the Planet, Taking Care of Business

Green products and supplies for the office have come a long way over the last decade

It used to be that you could only purchase recycled paper products. Now there is a wide range of products and services out there that will help you get your office green, by saving green and saving the planet at the same time! Plus it doesn't hurt that it is a great excuse to send out a press release (online of course to save the trees), announcing how socially responsible your company is.

Create a feel good mindset among your employees when they realize you care about not only the global environment, but the environment of the workspace as well. Unfortunately, most workers face on a daily basis toxic paint on the wall, to poor working and dirty ventilation systems and other work toxic hazards caused by modern materials used in construction over the last decade (asbestos anyone?).

I have found a few helpful sites to help you green up:

Office Supplies:
Green Office
Green Earth Office Supplies
Greenline Paper Company and other office supplies too!

eWaste - getting rid of old electronics - desktops, notebooks, televisions etc.:
Computer Recycling for Education
HP Supplies Recycling
Or there are a lot of Charities that will take your old toner cartridges and recycle them for money and use those funds to help their cause -
For Example: Town Cats - a Northern California cat rescue - who uses the funds to take care of cats whose owners have died or who would have been killed at an Animal Shelter. They house and take care of them until they can find them permanent homes.

Recycling for the Office:
Earth 911 - Helping Business Help the Environment - Recycling Guide
Waste Online - Key office wastes and what to do with each one of them (UK Site)

Building Green:
World Resources Institute
U.S. Green Building Council

If you have any other sources for green business I should consider adding, let me know!