Viral marketing and viral seeding without the shame. Los Angeles to Internationally, Artisan Crew Web Marketing.

Viral Marketing: It's What Everyone's Talking About
Viral Marketing: It's What Everyone's Talking About
Let's give them something to tweet about.

Viral Marketing & Viral Advertising

What is viral marketing? You've probably heard it's Free Shares Likes #Hashtags Retweets How You Succeed Revolutionary Magic Videos and Stuff What The Kids Do

We love ideating break-frame buzzwords and tent-pole strategies as much as the next game-changing Los Angeles viral marketing or Torrance web marketing company, but what does that all that actually mean?

Totally Technical Definition:

noun-

Simply put, viral marketing is a marketing technique to achieve marketing objectives (such as sales or brand awareness) by having your content or message shared by people who actually find it worth sharing without paying additional costs to get it in front of extra eyes. You start with a message in some format; video, images, post, and it is spread by the people viewing it like a virus (get it?!), beginning with one person and spreading quickly to others, as opposed to most traditional and internet marketing which relies of paying per click or view and gets your ad out to a pre-determined number of viewers, quite possibly uninterested ones.

Since You asked - More Great Info:

Viral marketing consists, broadly, of two parts: Content and Seeding. Whether you use a viral marketing company to promote your business or you make a video of your cat and share it on Youtube, the process boils down to those two components. Content is what you hope to be shared, seeding is the act of putting your content in front of people who will like it and spread it.

See Some Artisan Crew Viral Marketing Case Studies Here

Viral Marketing is All About Participation.

Artisan Crew

From LA to Tokyo, Viral Marketing Can Spread Your Brand

Why to Use Viral Marketing

The Good:

Potentially Amazing ROI

The top reason to engage in viral marketing is the potential ROI. If you spend $100 to get one person to convert, but they only buy $20, you have lost money. If you spend $100 to get that $20 customer but they then share it with 10 other people who each buy $20 from you, then you’ve done well. You’ve gotten a great return on your investment, and almost all of it came from people who you did not directly market to.

Viral marketing can also be a much cheaper way to spread brand recognition.

Low Cost Incremental Reach

Unless your name rhymes with Mepsi, Loca-Lola or Mudweiser, you probably don’t have an unlimited ad budget. To reach a large audience with a small budget, it is imperative to maximize the effect of each marketing endeavor you engage in. Even if you don’t get 10 million Youtube views or 100,000 shares on Facebook, any viral lift you get is essentially free advertising minus what you spend on content creation and seeding. If you can reach 2 people through viral marketing for the price of 1 through PPC, why wouldn’t you? By planning your marketing initiatives to have viral potential, you give yourself a chance to get incremental views at a low cost.

Finding Your Voice

Not everyone can give away a trip to Hawaii. Not everyone has the best, newest invention to offer the world. Not everyone sells out their new products before they’re even available for sale. But every company has something unique to offer. If it didn’t, it would have no reason to exist. Finding what sets you apart, presenting those selling points, and to the right audience are the keys to online marketing in general, and especially true for viral marketing. But viral marketing also helps you define this voice, too. It gives you a forum to build your brand.

The Bad:

When Done Badly, It's Really B.A.D.

The problem with poorly done viral is that when it’s done poorly it’s painfully obvious. The trick is to, wait for it... NOT TO TRICK PEOPLE. Getting people to spread your content of their own volition and because they want to, because you've come up with an idea so entertaining, they OPT-IN to being advertised to. Advertising's not a one-way street any more regardless of what the big agencies think. Content doesn’t go viral because you pander for shares, begging people to like you. It goes viral because it resonates on some level with your target consumer and is something they want to spread to others.

Succeeding at Viral Seeding (Not Suck-Seeding)

Online marketing, more than any other medium, is a two-way street. Users have banner-blindness, switch windows until your ad is over, and close popups before they even load. Presenting your content in a way that users want to not only view it but share it with people they know (or total strangers) is vital to the success of the campaign. Just posting something online and waiting for it to “go viral” is not enough. You need to understand your target and present the content in the way which gives you the best chance to succeed. For example, if you want to do viral marketing in Los Angeles it's a different target market (and therefore different seeding) than if you want to do viral marketing in Japan. Los Angeles viral marketing will obviously revolve around beaches and movie stars and cats, while Japanese viral marketing will most definitely involve giant lizards coming out from the ocean and cats. NOTE: it is very important not to stereotype when targeting for seeding campaigns.

The Ugly:

The Best Examples

Of Bad Viral marketing

Are all the campaigns you've never seen because your friends don't see it and haven't shared it.
But there are also the "insult our users / customers / consumers" hubris failures that we'd be glad to share.

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Online brand management experts, Artisan Crew, Los Angeles.