What is “viral marketing?”

Viral marketing in an Internet environment refers to marketing through the medium of email. The Internet offers great scope for viral marketing. As a small business owner viral marketing tools to expand my customer reach. I send emails only after building an email list. This ensures that only those who are interested in the services that I offer get my messages. Every email sent needs to make clear that the organization is not involved in spamming. It is important that these email addresses are used only for genuine business communications and that they are not let out to commercial customer databases. This is one strict rule that I follow in my marketing strategy. Using an online video directory for furthering your marketing efforts is a good viral marketing strategy.

Viral marketing strategies that use promotional or marketing videos become successful when a new product is genuinely different from others and when it gains wide publicity by word of mouth. I must tell you that the offshoot of this marketing strategy is when we speak about the products or services to our friends and if the service is relevant to them, it is very easy to communicate the benefits. The viral marketing programs that I send out usually use an incentive based approach. This serves as a trigger or incentive to my customers to try out the service that I am promoting. Viral marketing saves me quite some money as I can send emails to hundreds of people at a minimal cost to get more sales. The effectiveness of using video directories in viral marketing strategies is that the campaign gets going when we inform our friends or dedicated customers about the service or fill out a questionnaire or inform other people.

I have realized the utility of video marketing as the number of regular clients for my business quadrupled after I started using city video directories for promoting my business. We, as small business owners, aim at using the Internet as an information resource for the products and services that we intend to sell. I must tell you that viral marketing has a very powerful network effect as a group of consumers create a buzz about a product or service by using bookmarking sites to let their contacts know of their experiences with the product.

Linking is one of the most effective and simplest ways of initiating our viral marketing efforts. When someone sends an email highlighting a product or some information, the effect is much better and long lasting if that person publishes a positive review on social bookmarking websites and links back to you. Once you get a couple of web links to your business website you could get thousands of potential contacts. People are often attracted to great services that are free to use. For example, some free email services grew quickly with little or no marketing spends as they embedded viral marketing into the services that they offered.

Viral marketing, like all good marketing techniques, needs to be thought through properly and applied professionally. There is a need to understand how online city directories contribute to the purchase process. It is not the visitor volume numbers that matter, but the focus must be on the quality of the product along with the influence that the website and multimedia communications create in the minds of the consumer.

This article was written by Birgit Rickert of Results Marketing and The Video City Directories, and may not be copied, reproduced or altered without prior consent.