Viral Marketing for List Building

Gaining interest from viewers is ultimately the big trick of list building. Exposure has its place, to be sure, but yelling from the top of a mountain isn’t going to help any if no one is listening. One of the best ways to build interest in your product is viral marketing.

Viral marketing takes advantage of the oldest marketing technique and brings it to a higher level. It’s word of mouth at the speed of light. This concept is what should be in mind with any viral marketing campaign.

Many businesses have misunderstood viral marketing to be just a matter of venue. Companies have posted their television ads on YouTube hoping to capitalize on viral marketing and wondered what went wrong when it didn’t have the desired effect. They miss a crucial part of what viral marketing is.

The essentials of viral marketing are that it has to be free, it has to be “contagious,” and it has to be easily spread. Without any one of these three elements, it doesn’t work. Let’s look at these three elements and how they work.

It all starts with you giving something away. It could be an e-book, an image file, a video, or a podcast. It could also be a great number of other things, but these are the most common. The essential idea is that electronic data is inexpensive to create “in mass,” so it’s the easiest to give away in large numbers.

It should be relevant to your product, because ultimately, that’s what you’re trying to make them want. It should only be a teaser of what your product can do for the customer. It could be a demonstration, a “leaked document,” or merely a catchy advertisement.

“Catchy” is the most commonly misunderstood element of viral marketing. Whatever your giveaway is, it should be something that people want to begin with. Because of this idea, you can’t just dryly demonstrate or describe what your product can do.

There has to be something that keeps their attention WHILE the demo is happening. Don’t go for flashing lights and talks about how crazy you are for making this offer—that tends to chase many people away. Instead, try working this demonstration into comedy. The idea is to make them like the giveaway so much that they have to tell other people about it.

If you do the last part right, you will essentially make marketers out of your viewers. They will want to pass your giveaway on to their friends and relatives. You can expect that they will send a copy of your promo on, and it can be infinitely spread that way. This is where the use of electronic media really has a chance to shine. The promoting will have gone out of your hands, and will spread like—well—a virus. Before you know it, with little effort, you will have drawn thousands of visitors to your opt-in page. It doesn’t take much, but if you’re infectious enough, they WILL opt in.