What Is Viral Marketing?

What is viral marketing? Can you use it? (YES!). Does it work (YES!) How does it work? How do you get it to work for your business? It's easier than you might think.

Viral marketing is another term for word-of-mouth marketing or marketing that propagates itself. Online viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces web site users to pass on a message to other users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect.

After word-of-mouth referrals, your web site should probably be the next best source of new business. I say this because many of the people I work with are getting 60%, 70%, or even up to 90% of their new customers from their websites.

Viral marketing on the Internet is pretty exciting stuff. It should work pretty quickly, it can be quite effective, and it should be part of your online marketing strategy.

Can you use it at your web site? Should you be using it?

The answer to both of these questions is YES.

Think about it. A bride is visiting your web site and wants to tell her groom about your web site. Sure she can send an email with your website address (let's hope she types it correctly), but what if she could just click a button and it was done for her.

What if she wanted to tell her wedding coordinator about it? What if the Maid-of-Honor is helping and finds a web site for a great caterer. This just touches the surface, but you get the idea of how it works.

So the benefits are:

* It works and will help you generate more traffic and as a result get more appointments and book more weddings

* It's inexpensive to implement

* It's not going to cost thousands of dollars (or shouldn't)

* Using the simple "Tell A Friend" viral marketing technique above you really just set it up, strategically place it throughout your website, and let it run.

Here's how you do it.

First, give people a reason to want to tell others about your website. Dont just assume they'll want to spread the word. You really have to think this through and give them a reason.

You can do this simply by having great photos, offering great service, have delivered excellent service to someone else in the past, offering a unique service or feature related to your services or products, or offering a downloadable "take-away".

Next, make it easy for them to tell someone else about your website (and one of the things mentioned above).

Then, ask them to tell a friend. Provide a compelling call to action and make it easy to find throughout your website.

You can find these scripts all over the Internet in all kinds of complexity.

I've written one specifically with wedding vendors in mind and more information about it is available here:

http://www.bookmoreweddings.com/products/item11.cfm