The Elements of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign

When you’re planning your viral marketing campaign strategy, it’s important to keep in mind the basic requirements of every viral campaign. Without these, your stampede might turn out to be more like a leisurely stroll.

To build a good viral campaign, make sure your plan includes

• A free product or service
• The product has to be easily transferable to another person
• It has to be able to scale easily
• It has to take advantage of other people’s resources
• It has to be unique

We’re going to take a look at each of these elements, and examine how you can use them to design and launch your own viral marketing campaign. Don’t worry. It’s not as complicated as it looks!

There is a Free Lunch, and You’re Serving It

Every single viral marketing campaign begins with giving something away. Every one. It could be an eBook, a piece of software, an instructional video, or even a few laughs, but it has to be free.

And when we say free, we mean free. Not free with an opt-in or a free trial. It has to be really free, because you’re going to encourage your customers to share it with their friends, and no one wants to tell their sister she has to sign-up for your list to get the cool thing you’re giving away.

Now that doesn’t mean you’re giving away the farm. But you do need to give away great stuff. There’s lots of ways you can do that, while still leaving your customers wanting more.

For example, if you build and sell a software package that helps bloggers find free photos for use on their blog, you could offer a free version of the software that only searches one database instead of several. Or if you’ve written an eBook, you might release one chapter for free.

One thing to remember, though, is that the free product giveaway must be useful all by itself. You’re not releasing a free trial, you’re essentially building two products.

One which you’ll give away and one which you will sell, and they both need to be valuable to your users. Free software that is so limited as to be worthless is not a good candidate for a viral marketing campaign. The same is true for a chapter of an eBook that ends with a question.

Some marketers pull just this sort of trick to “force” customers to upgrade, but very often it will backfire. Customers are savvy, and they dislike being manipulated this way, so don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll lose sales by giving away too much information, because the opposite is actually true.

You’ll gain sales by giving away great stuff. Especially if your great stuff is easy for your users to share among their friends, family, and colleagues.

Share and Share Alike

The second element of a fantastic viral marketing campaign is the ability of your customers to share your product with their peers. Think about the hundreds of email forwards you get in a year. That’s because people love to share great stuff.

Good marketers know this and take advantage of it by providing their customers with what they want, and then they sit back and watch it spread.

Social Networks for Your Viral Marketing Campaign

Viral campaigns thrive on the Internet largely because of the social networks that exist. Ten years ago marketers had to rely on telephones and email (maybe) to get the word out about a new product or a great service. You can imagine the results were unpredictable and slow to materialize.

Today, we have dozens – maybe even hundreds – of social networks to use to get our message to the masses. But for some, that means having the opposite problem: where do you start?

For an online marketer, the first place to start is with your very own email list. These are the people who already know you, like you, and buy from you. They’re your biggest fans, and they’re the ones who are most likely to pass your great products on to their family and friends and social network.

So make sure you’re keeping them informed about the latest products you’re developing, any contests you’re holding, or any other thing that’s going on that they might want to share.

You probably have an account with several of the more popular social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter. But for viral marketing to work in these venues, you have to be hanging out with the right crowd. If you use Facebook primarily for friend and family interaction, trying to launch a viral campaign there is probably not a good move.

The same goes for Twitter. Do you follow those in your niche, or those who are other marketers? If it’s the latter, your niche campaign won’t have very good results here either.

Instead, make an effort to follow those who share your passion for your niche, instead of those who are simply marketing their own online business.

Now if your niche is internet marketing, then you should be following other marketers, but that’s the only exception.

Concentrate on following – and being followed by – those who are in your niche, but who are not necessarily selling in your niche. In other words, you want to be hanging out with the buyers, not the sellers.

For strictly social interaction, Facebook and Twitter are your number one choices. If your target market is other business owners, though – say for example you sell a product aimed at accountants – you need to get on LinkedIn. If you’re not familiar with it, LinkedIn is basically a database of business professionals in all areas of expertise. It’s similar to Facebook, but without the games and other social activities.

LinkedIn allows you to network with other professionals in your area of expertise, form groups, organize meetings, and develop a vast network of colleagues you can reach out to through private messaging or by posting status updates.

You can automate your LinkedIn updates just like you can with Facebook and Twitter, and even link your other social network accounts so everything is up to date. If your product is geared toward professionals, LinkedIn is the social network of choice.

For viral campaigns built around funny videos, great photography, comic strips, or other visual media, StumbleUpon is the social network of choice. A combination of a social application and a bookmarking service, StumbleUpon is where you go when you’re looking for new stuff on the Internet.

Just click the button on your toolbar, and you’ll be transported to the next interesting thing as determined by the choices you made when you signed up. Like animals? StumbleUpon will serve up a random cat video or heartwarming dog story. Into sports? You might land on a video of Tiger Woods hitting a hole in one, or an ad for a new kind of practice ball.

Of course, getting your content to go viral on a social network involves more than just putting it out there and hoping for the best. Later on we’ll discuss how you can give your campaign a virtual push to get it started, but for now, just be aware of the options available in the social networking world. Each has its own purpose and followers, so pay attention to where your customers hang out to determine the best social networks for your needs.

Blogging for Your Viral Marketing Campaign

Blogging is often the first thing we think of when we think of sharing things online, and with good reason. With millions of blogs out there, and thousands more being started every day, it makes good sense for you to promote your viral campaign through your blog – and through the blogs of others. Here’s how.

A blog is a community. You lead the discussion with a post about a topic, and your readers add their comments. If your blog has a large following, it’s the perfect medium for starting a viral stampede.

Start by building up the anticipation of a new release – say a free eBook – encourage your followers to comment, ask questions, and submit topics they’d like you to cover.

Once your eBook is released, blog about it (naturally) and encourage your readers to use their own social networks to promote it. Provide easy to use social networking buttons for the major networks, like Twitter and Facebook, and sit back and watch the stampede grow.

Email

Email is the primary medium by which campaigns turn viral. Think of that old shampoo commercial with Heather Locklear. She’s talking about how great the shampoo is, and says “So I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on.”

That’s precisely how email works to expand the reach of your viral campaign. You email your list, and your subscribers email their lists – or if they don’t have lists (not everyone is a marketer) then they email their friends and family. It’s similar to social networking, but email has a more personal feel, even when you’re receiving a recommendation because you’re part of an email marketing list.

Before Starting a Stampede, Make Sure There’s Room to Run

I’m sure you’ve seen an email (or three) from a marketer who’s embarrassed that their “server crashed” due to an influx of orders. Sometimes this is merely a ploy to get you to check out their fabulous offer, but the whole reason this ploy came into being is because it really did happen on some product launches. Don’t let it happen to you, because your campaign might not recover.

Always make sure your viral marketing campaign has plenty of room to grow. Remember, the whole point of planning a viral campaign is to get it to take off at breakneck speeds and drive thousands of new customers to your website.

You better make sure you have enough beer and pizza on hand when they get there, or they’ll leave disappointed, and with bad memories of you and your hostess skills.

Here’s a checklist you can use to make sure you’ve got plenty of room (and snacks) for a party:

• Host videos on YouTube or other video hosting site, never on your own servers. The bandwidth usage will quickly get your site taken down.

• Compress your content into the smallest package for fast and easy downloads. No one wants to spend an hour downloading a video, even if it is free, and even if it is the greatest tutorial about making money with Amazon that the Internet has ever seen.

• Upgrade your hosting plan to fit your needs. If you’re planning a viral stampede, you can’t do it with a Hostgator Baby account. They might say unlimited bandwidth, but when you do hit the limit, they will shut your sites down. Upgrade to something more robust, or host your files elsewhere.

• Plan ahead for any major upgrades you’re going to need. When the developers of Hotmail launched their new application, you can bet they had lots of servers ready to switch on as soon as they were needed. Nothing will kill a viral marketing campaign quicker than a bogged down system.

Learn to Use Your Friends and Their Resources

Leveraging the power of your own network is an important aspect of any successful viral marketing campaign. Chances are some of your friends are marketers just like yourself, and chances are they’ve got mailing lists, blogs, and Twitter followers in related, complementary niches. These are powerful assets you can use when it comes to launching a viral campaign.

Here’s a short list of ways you can leverage the resources of other marketers to get the word out about your new campaign:

• Buy ad space on related blogs
• Guest post on related, but non-competing blogs
• Buy ad space in newsletters in your niche
• Offer affiliate commissions for lead generation
• Make yourself available for interviews about your product or business

Make it Special

The final element of any viral marketing campaign is its uniqueness. The same old eBook offering the same old, seen-it-everywhere plan for planning a destination wedding isn’t likely to go viral. But add a new twist or your unique take on it, and suddenly it has potential.

That doesn’t mean you have to invent a new way to train dogs, though. It just means you have to offer a unique view.

In other words, be yourself. You’ll get a lot further by giving your eBook or video or podcast your own voice than you will with simply rehashing what others have already said many times over.

Another way to add a unique flair to your content is by giving away checklists, printable workbooks, and other user-friendly features that can’t be found elsewhere. We’ll talk about that some more in an upcoming post on creating viral eBooks, but for now just remember that unique and unusual products and marketing campaigns will spread faster and farther than anything else.

You can see that all these elements go together like a jigsaw puzzle. Without all of them, the picture is incomplete, and they all rely on each other to work. Without the resources of your friends, your social networking strategy won’t work as well or be as far reaching. Without a good product, your friends and readers won’t be likely to share it with others. Without a great distribution network, it won’t matter how good your product is, because no one will see it.