Viral, or word of mouth marketing, can reduce the cost of any campaign by getting existing leads to refer new ones. These additional leads are free and easy to get. Did you know that 35% of the 3 million leads we’ve helped businesses collect have been from direct referrals?
Rule #1 – People Share Cool Shit
Have something on the site that people want to share or that makes it worth sharing. If it’s “cool” people will share it.
Rule #2 – Make Sharing Easy
Make it easy to share said “cool shit”. This means leveraging standard social network sharing mechanisms and popular sites like YouTube, Slideshare, etc depending on what type of media or content you are trying to make go viral. If you publish the content behind a pay wall or some obscure service that’s not easy to share… it will be that much harder.
Rule #3 – Make it Worth Sharing
You can always grease the wheel by making it worth someone while to share. A lot of our customers, for example, leverage a mechanism that rewards people for sharing. The reward could be a discount for anyone that shares with three friends or simply a contest “the most shares wins X”.
Rule #4 – Seed the Traffic
If you are starting with no reputation without an existing audience you are going to need to seed traffic. You can do this by:
- Having someone else, with an audience, promote your site/content/etc.
- Buying traffic with Google or Facebook Ads
- Selling it hard on your own. A little sweat equity never hurt trying to make something popular.
Rule #5 – Not everything cool goes viral
For everything that “goes viral” there are thousands of other similar things that simply don’t make it. That means it make take you several tries to see what sticks for your area.
Rule #6 – Build it into your product
If possible… build a sharing/viral experience in that improves the user experience. Look at what AirBnB does by forcing you to review places you stay. Then they strongly encourage you to share that experience (if it was positive) on social networks.
Rule #7 – Find out why people aren’t sharing your message.
Reach out to your first 1,000 customers personally and find out if they’ve told anyone who might be interested. If not, find out what it would take to get them to do so. Just be direct.
This might sound rather tedious, but you’ll learn very decisively what you need to do (or do better) to earn this kind of recommendation organically. The fact is, most of what you do to get your name out there will fail whereas we both know personal recommendations work. So tedious it might be, but it’s also a very effective way to uncover things about your market you probably don’t yet realize.
Rule #8 – Create a “mission” your customers can get involved in.
We all yearn to be part of something meaningful, worthwhile and bigger than ourselves. So let’s say your goal is to get 10,000 customers by next month. Tell your customers: if they like you and the way you’ve positioned your cause, they’re very likely to help you achieve your goal – or at least go a long way to doing so. A little transparency can go a long way.
Rule #9 – Run a referral contest.
A variation of the previous tip is to hold a tell-a-friend contest, where the customer who generates the most referrals (paid or trial, that’s up to you) within a designated time period wins a prize. Make the prize relevant to your customers’ interests as well as worth the effort.
Rule #10 – It might be OK to be just a little viral.
Going truly viral means that for every one person that joins up you get more than one additional person for free. That leads to the awesome hockey-stick style growth of traffic, users, etc. But most businesses don’t work that way.
But that doesn’t mean you should stop trying to follow the rules. If, for example, every person that signs up brings .3 more people… that’s a 30% boost you didn’t have before. With our product, for example, we see an average of a 35% “Viral Boost”. That’s 35 more leads for every 100 you had to bring in the hard way. That helps lower you average cost per lead assuming you, like everyone else, have a customer acquisition cost.
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