Many small business owners are great at what they do. They
are skilled, experienced and competent business managers. They have an
established client base and are ticking along nicely. What more could a
business owner want? Well, good clients who come back for more are great, and
let’s face it, we all want them.
However, what if you run the type of business service that
can be offered outside of your local area? A service that anyone in any part of
the country or the world for that matter could benefit from. Word needs to get
out and your word-of-mouth referrals don’t travel that far afield. That’s where
many businesses turn to the internet to begin their expansion. Too many of
them, however, fall into the trap of creating a website, throwing in a few
keywords then sitting back and waiting for the profits to come rolling in.
Adverts in online directories are a great way (and one of
many) to attract prospective customers, yet the last few years have seen video
and social marketing really take over from other online methods. However, to
some business managers terms like internet marketing, SEO and viral marketing
are foreign languages and quite frankly, scary. So, what is viral marketing?
Here goes, viral has pretty much the same meaning as used in
medical contexts: something, a disease or an illness, that spreads. Notice the
similarity between this concept and word-of-mouth referrals? That’s because
viral marketing is simply the online or internet version of word-of-mouth
advertising.
In the online world, this takes place when someone sees one
of your ads, your website or a post on an online forum or social website. If
they like what they see, they’ll share it with people they know and so, your
information is distributed or even, spread like a virus. Now that you’ve made
the connection and this term doesn’t seem so alien or scary any more, start
thinking about how you can get your message out to people and get them
effectively working for you by spreading your news like wildfire!
More coming up in our next blog post.
Pacita Productions is a UK media production company with promotional video ideas for organisations of all types and a team to assist with multilingual video marketing and advertising.
