In this “Viral Marketing: The Ultimate Guide” you’re going to learn:
- What’s The Difference Between Traditional Marketing and Viral Marketing?
- How Do You Design a Viral Campaign?
- Examples of Viral Internet Marketing Campaigns (developing)
- How to Find a Viral Marketing Expert? (coming soon)
- Best Viral Marketing Tools (developing)
What is the Difference Between Traditional Marketing and Viral Marketing?
While there is a description, I decided to shoot a very quick video that lays out the difference between traditional and viral marketing. I’ll be adding more text, but I’ve had this question so many times that I thought I’d just get something up here and walk you through our infographic that’s also down below. Keep coming back because we’re going to be adding a ton of content to this page!
Traditional Marketing:
In traditional marketing, as a local business owner, you match your target market with your best marketing message using the most appropriate media. And, for every dollar that you put into the campaign, you can track how much money you are making. This is a simple Return on Investment calculation.
Once you calculate your return on investment, you pick the most appropriate media and winning message to scale your business. In traditional marketing, you simply add more money into the campaigns that give you a positive Return on Investment and you can predict the total earnings over time. The result is a linear improvement to your bottom line.
Here’s a Quick Example:
For instance, if you invest $1,000 into your best campaign, which is giving you a 2.0 ROI, then you can expect that the campaign will give you $2,000 in return. And, as your business grows you can invest more of your profits back into advertising. And, assuming you can now invest $2,000 into your winning campaign, you can count on a return of $4,000.
Viral Marketing:
Viral marketing used to be called “word of mouth” marketing, but some brainiac wanted to make a name for himself and change it up. And, as a business owner, I’m sure you’re very familiar with word of mouth advertising. It’s the best kind!
Why?
Because it takes advantage of happy customers spreading the word about your business and giving you a recommendation. That recommendation is instant credibility, which boosts that money in your cash register.
This is how it works…
You put $1,000 into your marketing campaign to generate the same $2,000 in return as traditional marketing (in the above example), but those raving fans tell 2 friends each. That means you’ve now multiplied your reach by 3! And, there you have it… you’ve gone viral!
How Do You Design a Viral Campaign
In this section you see an infographic that shows 3 successful viral campaign designs. And, below there’s a little discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each. In fact, I thought it might be easier to understand by recording a quick video for you to review:
In this infographic we talk about the 3 successful structures of viral campaigns that anyone can create – even if you don’t have a website.
Design One: Giveaway Loop
This allows everyone entering to be a winner! In fact, it is simply a viral modification of the traditional lead magnet funnel found in most online businesses today. You simply create your front end lead magnet. Then, when your prospect opts into your list they are taken immediately to a thank you page.
On the thank you page, you simple provide them with the giveaway item (instant access) and incentivize them to share your offer with their friends and colleagues via social media or email. This means you’re giving away a bonus to whomever shares or earns a minimum number of points. And, typically you give away points for sharing and for referred sign ups.
The incentive for the bonus creates the viral buzz and all of a sudden you’re getting prospects sent to your page by those already on your list. There is no better way to leap over the trust hurdle than have your new subscribers recommend your offer to others!
Design Two: Sweepstakes Loop
This loop is designed with a biggo offer nobody can refuse. It reminds me of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes idea. You have to enter to win! And, the winner is drawn at random at the end of the sweepstakes. But, there’s one really cool thing about this loop…
When your new lead comes through the front door, you offer up an opportunity for them to stuff the ballot box with more entries.
How?
They get extra sweepstakes entries for sharing and even more for sign-ups that came from them! How cool is that!?
The buzz that’s created by the opportunity to stuff the ballot box helps take the campaign viral and you’re off to the races…plunking fresh names on your list that are targeted to your offer and your niche!
Design Three: Affiliate Loop
This loop has proven to be the most powerful of all three in our experience. It’s all about setting up a contest with those that have already entered to win.
What I mean by that is…
You give your new leads a way to earn a bonus or more importantly, win the “grand prize”. The grand prize goes to the person that has the most leads sign up from their links and email sharing. So, if you’ve got a super-affiliate or someone with a massive email list, they get rewarded with an uber-prize that keeps them competing for first place.
We’ve seen this structure outperform the other two by a factor of 10!
Examples of Viral Internet Marketing Campaigns
So, by now I’m sure you’re wondering what a real campaign really looks like aren’t you?
Well, here goes nothing!
Video Walk-through:
In this video I walk you through the critical components of the screen capture and infographic below. This video is going to unveil some of the critical secrets we’ve discovered during our testing of viral campaigns.
What you’re looking at now is a sample campaign I ran for a very specific niche in the ecommerce space, using a physical product:
After your prospect registers, he (or she) is shown the thank you and share page. Here we’re using a share page that incentivizes sharing through a bonus prize:
Now that you’ve seen one of our campaigns in detail, you might like to see how these campaigns can be hosted on your own site with some special conversion boosting features:
Example Two: ClickFunnels Big Brand Self-Hosted Giveaway
In this example, you can see that hosting a campaign on your own site can look very much like just having an optin page set up. This online tool does generate a ton of search traffic by itself, but they’re using a viral campaign to make it even better:
Best Viral Marketing Tools
We’ve compiled a quick list of what we think are the best viral marketing tools. Keep coming back to see updates to this list and links to reviews.
UpViral – an easy to use application that netted 114,485 qualified leads in only 30 days.
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[…] After we recorded this, we decided to put together a more comprehensive post titled, Viral Marketing: The Ultimate Guide, give you the step-by-step process for doing this […]