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VIRAL MARKETING OR WORD OF MOUTH MARKETINGSpread the word about your hot new product or company, by harnessing the power of viral or word-of-mouth marketing! Viral marketing or Word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful and persuasive weapon you can use, and it won’t cost you anything! Here is one of the first resources on how to harness the often underestimated power of word-of-mouth, and be heard above the media noise. 1. Word-of-mouth marketing is actually the center of the marketing universe. 2. Just as it is untrue that the sun revolves around the earth, marketing does not really revolve around advertising, selling, and promotions. Much of marketing actually centers around illusion-creation. 3. Word-of-mouth offers an authenticity to it because the source is normally independent of the company, he or she is offering his or her own candid opinion and therefore, the marketing appears credible. 4. Advertising is the renting of a medium to send out a carefully crafted message to a specific audience. Everything is paid for, whereas viral marketing is a more effective tool; and best of all, it is absolutely free. 5. Viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing can take on a life of its own. There are no limits to how far-reaching it can be. Just study how fast a good joke on the e-mail circulates. 6. Studies have shown that a satisfied customer will tell an average of three people about a product or service she likes, and eleven people about a product or service with which she had a negative experience. 7. Because this is the age of the Internet, e-mail, websites, chat rooms, and video teleconferencing, word-of-mouth marketing is even more important to businesses today than ever before. 8. Marketing success is determined more by the time it takes for your customer to decide on your product than by any other single factor. Decision speed is more powerful than positioning, image, value, customer satisfaction, guarantees, or even product superiority. 9. Shortening the customer’s decision cycle means your product’s benefits, claims, and promises must be obvious and compelling; information must be clear, balanced, and credible; comparisons must reveal meaningful differences, your trials should be free and easy, your evaluations, clear and simple. 10. A good way to spread the word on your company is to circulate true, positive stories about it. FedEx is famous for its legendary employee who hired a chopper just to deliver a package forgotten on the tarmac. People love a good story, and that is the essence of viral marketing. 11. Employees should be actively spreading word of mouth about your products. 12. Word of mouth accelerates the process of customer decision-making, from deciding to decide, asking for information, weighing options, evaluating a free trial, and then finally becoming a customer and advocate. 13. With customer-oriented service, your company can increase sales via word of mouth. A VIRAL MARKETING STRATEGY SHOULD BE AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF YOUR WEB SITE'S PROMOTIONAL STRATEGYHere are five different ways you can achieve this: 1. Send to a friend script We've all seen them, those buttons on web sites inviting us to Send to a friend. You generally enter in the names and email addresses of people you would like to recommend the site to, and the script will then send those people an email containing the URL of the web site together with a short message. Here's some resources you can use: http://www.referralblast.com - claim you can add it to your site within 10 minutes, charge from $99 per year. 2. Freebies Giving something away for free is one of the most powerful marketing methods available. Giving something away for free in the *right way* turns it into a VIRAL marketing method that is much more powerful. For example:
The important thing is to ensure the freebie actually has some value and has a quality that reflects on the quality of your business - dont give away something just because its virtually worthless, it will reflect badly on you and the results will be poor. Instead, give the freebie a realistic value, tell people what this is and then let them download it for free. However, ensure you include link/s to your website/s and product/s to ensure that giving away something of value actually brings you results in the end - there is certainly delayed gratification involved here, but if you do it right you'll be on to a winner. 3. Write articles Web site and ezine owners are constantly on the look out for articles, tutorials and other content they can use. Writing articles is one of the most powerful ways to spread your marketing message at targetted web-surfers. All you need to do is allow people to republish it for free, as long as they include a resource box at the end of the article containing details of your web site, or even of your ezine. As well as posting the articles on your own site, and distributing them to your own mailing list, there are also various places online where publishers and authors meet, i.e. you provide the article, and other people publish it for you if they are interested. 'These sites are highly regarded': Idea Marketers 4. Affiliate programs Most of the successful web sites use an affiliate program of one sort or another, that encourage other web masters to partake in publicizing someone elses products or services in return for a commission on the sale price. Im sure were all familiar with these. 5. Word of mouth We started with this, see above! There are of course many other techniques you can try, but these are our top five favorites, so try them out and see the traffic to your web site explode. Its hard work, but when you see the results you'll consider it more than worth it. For afree initial consultation on all aspect of viral marketing campaign contact
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