Have you seen the JK Wedding Dance video on Youtube? Once the video went viral, it was featured on many TV shows and internet outlets. Use these 10 tips to gain the same sort of success for your business through viral video marketing.

Video Marketing – Taking a Message Viral

1. One of a Kind – When you are the only one doing something eye catching, people will stop and take notice, and then they will tell their friends. You have to seize the moment and ride it for all that it is worth though, because if you really have a good idea, someone will imitate you soon enough.

2. Shocking – It is fine to create a one of a kind message, but it has to get someone?People will be interested if you shock them (tastefully). Don’t be conservative–keep your video tasteful while shocking your viewers at the same time.

3. Speak English – While it is great that you and all of your buddies in the industry speak your own language, but very likely your customer do not, so do not speak in shorthand, speak English.

4. Be Genuine – You can try to be cool, and that guarantees that you will not be. Be genuine, and if what you created is good, it will become cool on its own.

5. Be Brief – Most viral videos go straight to the point. You get a nice little jolt that may be funny or shocking, but it is over almost before it has begun. Your viral video should barely be an interruption to the person watching it.

6. Be Funny – Laughter is one of the most powerful medicines known to man. It makes you feel good. People will not only enjoy your video message, but the will be eager to pass it along as well.

7. Shoot for the Stars – Rather than do something outrageous, do something over the top outrageous. Do something so surprising, so funny, so shocking, that people will have to watch your video just because they cannot believe their ears.

8. Be a Little Rough – Keep the quality of your video a little homemade looking. By not having your video look like a commercial, people will think that they have found a gem. Everyone loves to be the first one to discover something outrageous, so having your video look homemade lets them stumble upon a gem.

9. Be True to your Brand – While you are concentrating on being shocking and amazing, do remember that you have a reason for making the video, and that is to promote your business or product. So while you need to be amazing in your video, you also need to make your point and make it memorable.

10. Keep It Lively – Make sure that your video is full of action. Keep the talk to a minimum, and keep things moving. Make sure that you have enough dialogue so your audience can easily understand your point, and then keep thing moving.

These tips will help your video go viral, and once that happens everyone will know about your business.

Anton Pearce specializes in helping you to use internet marketing to get all the clients you need for your practice. Sign up for his highly acclaimed and miraculously free ezine and find out how to turn your website into an automated new client or patient referral generating machine.

]]> http://wiseguymarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/leverage-viral-video-marketing-to-benefit-your-business/feed/ 0 http://wiseguymarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/6-tips-for-creating-an-effective-online-newsletter/ http://wiseguymarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/6-tips-for-creating-an-effective-online-newsletter/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:23:13 +0000 admin http://wiseguymarketing.com/?p=265

Newsletters allow you to impress your subscribers. It can show your expertise and knowledge about the topic at hand and the many benefits you can offer them. When you impress people, they will become potential customers and another great thing is that they can recommend you to their friends, colleagues and family. All of them could very well be customers in the future.

Providing a newsletter for your opt-in list subscribers provides many benefits in terms of driving traffic into your site as well as boosting the sales and profits of your site and company. This is a marketing ploy that will not hugely dent your marketing budget and will not also require many man-hours in developing this project.

With a newsletter, you can inform the public about your company and products as well as services. You can keep them posted and updated about what’s going-on with your company as well as many of your promotions and offerings. With these, you keep on reminding your subscribers that you are still here and is willing to offer them good deals and services.

If you do not have a newsletter or publishing one for your site, then you may have to consider about researching and be well informed on how to publish one. It is not as easy as it seems but if and when you get the right idea and process, it will be smooth sailing from there on. Try to take the time to learn what you need to learn and get that newsletter ready and good to attract subscribers to your newsletter as well as traffic to your site.

In the next few paragraphs, I will provide you with some things to reflect on when you decide to start your own newsletter for your site. Here are five things to consider when publishing a newsletter.

1) Make sure that the content of your newsletter pertains to and closely associated with your business or the theme of your site. Do not dwell too far on what could be regarded as your field of expertise. You have started a site and your theme for your site will always be something you are knowledgeable about. For example; if you have a site that sells auto car parts, your newsletter must contain articles or content like photos that pertain to cars, auto parts and such. You may also include content about your company and your staff.

Remember that visitors of a certain site are there because they are interested in what the site has to offer. If they sign up for an opt-in list or for a newsletter this means that they want to be updated for that certain theme or subject. Be sure that when you publish your newsletter you are providing for the need of the subscriber as well as their interests.

2) Ensure that you have well written, information riddled and content rich articles. You articles will be the body of your newsletter and that they should be able to excite your readers as well as provide information. Articles should be well written and checked for errors such as spelling and grammatical errors for it to look professional and believable. The trust of your client to you and newsletter is at stake here.

3) Fact-check your articles. Make sure that you provide true facts and figures so that your reputation as an expert and knowledgeable in that field is not questioned. If you lose the trust of your subscribers these may persuade them to unsubscribe to your newsletter. You will lose many potential sales this way.

4) Provide fresh and new articles that can provide new information to your subscribers. If you publish stale and old news in your newsletter, there is a tendency that people or your subscribers already have read and known about them. This will lose their interest in your newsletter and they wont get to read what is most important, your ads. They may not open or read any of your succeeding newsletters losing your intention in writing and publishing newsletters, to get them to visit your site and make a purchase.

5) Never use copyrighted materials such as photos and articles. This is outright plagiarism, you may get into a lot of trouble for this. You can lose your business and get sued over copyright infringement. If you do not have the time to write your own articles, there are many willing and able professional article writers that can do it for you for a reasonable fee. All your investment in writing and publishing articles will be well worth it when you see your list build up and your traffic increasing.

6) Be sure to offer unique ways to get visitors to your website to opt-in to your newsletter. Offering a free special report available for immediate download can be very effective. I offer a free Website Makeover Analysis Quiz to get some of my visitors to opt-in

By the way for those companies that have a retail or store location, publishing an online newsletter is a great way to help in your local business marketing efforts.

Many small- to medium-sized businesses fail due to a lack of an effective marketing and sales program. Entrepreneurs may be very good at their core business, but know very little about marketing. Certain people suffer from the theory espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” They are innocently caught up in a love for their own products or services and believe the world will indeed beat a path to their door when prospects hear about the fantastic new product. This attitude is wrong, dangerous, and not in line with the practices of successful B2B marketers. In fact, more often than not, superior marketing beats a superior product.

Another reason for failure is that an effective marketing campaign is hard work. Since marketing is probably not what motivated the entrepreneur to open his or her business, it receives less priority than product development and other tasks. Marketing also often comes up short when scarce funds are allocated. Sadly, there are start-up companies that spend tens of thousands of dollars on furniture and equipment, while complaining that there is nothing left for marketing.

New companies also make a mistake by hiring expensive advertising agencies that are incapable of cost-effective, low-budget marketing. Or they hire marketing and sales talent from big companies, and these people are often clueless about how to get results on a limited budget. So if you are in a small company, be careful about hiring the hotshot from a big company to come solve your problems. It often doesn’t work. This is not to say that everyone from a big company is incapable of being effective with a smaller budget-some are great no matter the company size.

Small to medium businesses and start-ups face two major obstacles not shared by larger, entrenched companies. First, if you happen to be a small fish in a large pond, you will be confronted by competitors with much larger advertising and marketing budgets. Second, you may have to spend a larger percentage of your revenues on marketing than older, established organizations.

Given the reality of this situation, you need to squeeze as much efficiency as possible out of every dollar. Be assured that you can do a lot on a limited budget, and expensive does not always mean better. I’ve often used limited-budget strategies to beat the big players and you can do the same. And the lessons you learn by doing it the frugal way will serve you well, no matter how successful you become, or how far your marketing budget expands. Here are a collection of small budget strategies and tactics you can use to beat the big guys:

Small Budget Website Strategies:
1. Don’t overbuild your Website. There are ways to create an impressive site using less-complex open source or template approaches.
2. If possible, have an easy-to-remember Website address that relates to what your company does.
3. List your Web address (URL) on all of your corporate materials.
4. Make sure your Website is optimized for organic search terms. This is a low-cost strategy that will make you much easier to find.
5. Try narrowly focused low-cost pay per click search terms.
6. Give some information away for free to increase your Website stickiness.
7. Create many links with other sites to increase your search engine visibility.
8. Refresh your content often. Do not let the site go stale.

Small Budget Social Media Strategies:
1. Start your own blog and comment on other blogs.
2. Always list your Web address on your blog postings and any electronic communication.
3. Leverage LinkedIn and other networking sites.
4. Use Twitter to find relevant posts and prospects.
5. Be controversial (but not too controversial) to attract attention.
6. Choose a niche where you can be an expert.
7. Write articles and get them published in online media.
8. Focus on one or two social media outlets. This concentrated attention will bring more attention than throwing your efforts at five or six outlets.

Small Budget Email Strategies:
1. Work hard to build your email prospect file of opt-in names. This will be a gold mine of low-cost leads and sales.
2. Include a promotional message and your Website address as part of your standard email signature.
3. Provide links to valuable information in your emails, not just product pitches.
4. Make your emails interesting and/or unusual.
5. Run your email copy through a spam detection tool like EmailExam, Acxiom Digital, or Lyris ContentChecker to ensure your emails will not be caught in the spam filters.
6. Have an easy opt-out process. You do not want to keep sending emails to people who want to be removed from your list.

Small Budget Direct Marketing Strategies:
1. Target your lists more effectively by using demographics, psychographics, and some of the other list segmenting tools available. The object is to mail fewer packages and achieve greater response.
2. Test your mailing and telemarketing in small quantities before committing large sums to full-blown programs. Equally important, use the information you learn on every program to make the next work better.
3. Try a postcard mailer. The production costs are low, the first-class postage is less expensive than letter mail, and they pull very well. You can drive prospects to a Web form or toll-free telephone number.
4. Cut back on four-color process direct mail packages. Unless you sell food, magazines, resort properties, or other products requiring excellent graphic reproduction, you can probably pull as much response using two-color printing.
5. Consider mailing with third-class postage instead of first-class. Depending on whether you presort the file, this will save you a great amount of money, and most prospects will not notice the difference. The exception is with time-sensitive offers, since third-class mail can take a week longer to arrive than first-class.
6. If you mail to large numbers on a national basis, or send highly concentrated mailings into local or regional areas, use postal pre-sorting to lower postage costs.

More Cost-Cutting Ideas:
1. If you are a small company (a flea), find a big company (a dog) to partner with. This will make it much easier for you to sell to bigger companies.
2. Read the chapter on public relations carefully and begin carrying out its advice. PR is a low-effort, high-reward vehicle that is often under-utilized by small-budget marketers.
3. Be persistent. Remember the eight times rule: You don’t have to spend a lot of money on each communication, but you must repeat your message up to eight times to gain prospect awareness.
4. Write handwritten personal notes to prospects and customers. They are cheap but make a big impact.
5. Ask for referrals. They are much easier to sell, at lower cost.
6. Utilize experts. An expert’s advice will cost you something in the short term, but can save you money and aggravation in the long term.
7. List your primary products and services on your stationery and business card, or anything else you give to potential buyers.
8. Since consistency is vital for those with small budgets, make sure every one of your marketing efforts supports and reinforces your unique selling proposition (USP).
9. Sharpen your bargaining skills. Media outlets are hungry for business and many have unsold inventory. Use this to your advantage by negotiating aggressively.

One other important principle to practice is leverage. Try to create content once and use it in multiple marketing scenarios. This is less expensive and time-consuming, and the consistency of message is important.

Christopher Ryan is a noted expert in B2B marketing. Chris is founder and President of Fusion Marketing Partners and was formerly a senior marketing executive at companies like Sybase, PeopleSoft and Group 1 Software. You can buy Mr. Ryans latest book, How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing and Sales Machine, at Amazon.com or at Get the Book.

Guerrilla Marketing Tactics Guaranteed to Generate More Qualified Leads Faster, Easier & Cheaper!

Learn how to attract more leads, convert more prospects, generate more referrals, decrease your marketing costs, spend less and get better results in all your ads.

In This Intensive 1-Day Marketing Workshop David Carleton and Bill McRea Will Show You Exactly How To:

- How to Build a Strong Marketing Plan

- Promotional Strategies on Steroids – How to Drive Massive Amounts of Traffic to Your Business

- Killer Advertising Strategies That Get Results!

- Drive More Traffic, Get More Leads, Generate More Referrals and Increase Sales Using the Awesome Power of Social Media and Video Marketing

- How to Automate Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

- Simple Strategies Designed to Get Your Website Ready to Capture More Leads and Increase Sales

- How to Generate Massive Amounts of Traffic to Your Website

If you’re really serious about growing your business then you must attend this workshop.

http://www.SanDiegoLeadGenerationWorkshop.com

The Workshop will be held at:

San Diego North Chamber of Commerce
11650 Iberia Place #220
San Diego, CA 92128

To Register, Read Testimonials or See a Detailed Agenda Visit:
http://www.SanDiegoLeadGenerationWorkshop.com
Seating is limited so please register today

Don’t Eliminate Marketing – Just Outsource it. Your Results Might Even Be Better!

I don’t have to tell you that these are trying times. Unemployment, the housing market, layoffs, foreclosures, blah, blah, blah.

When business owners and managers go looking for places to cut expenses it usually ends up in two departments- HR and marketing. HR is asked to cut people and payroll and the sales and marketing department is asked to cut everything!

As hard as it may be to do, marketing is the last budget you should cut. The old saying applies more today than ever before – nothing happens until somebody sells something!

So what’s a company to do when they’ve cut everything else? If you must cut marketing budgets, cut strategically.

Lead generation and follow up marketing are the lifeblood of every business so try to keep as many of those funds intact. If you are going to cut your ad budget, try compensating for that in other ways.

Traditional advertising certainly is not as effective as it used to be, so why not “go guerrilla.” Guerrilla marketing by definition is something that has a low cost, but a very high ROI if done correctly. An example of that is social media marketing.

Joining social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube cost you nothing in cash but can literally double your lead generation efforts. People that tell you that you can’t generate sales through the use of social media marketing are just plain wrong.

Businesses all of the world have already proven that social media marketing can increase sales if done the right way. The problem is that most companies think that social media as another form of advertising which it is definitely not. Social media is about building relationships, participating in conversations and providing helpful information to friends, fans, followers and connections. The natural result of this sincere interaction can and does lead to increased sales.

As a lead generation consultant and social media marketing strategist, I help my clients map out a plan that fits their timing, budget and resources.

Cutting Marketing departments, budgets and personnel might be a financial necessity, but the need to find more prospects, service your current customers and build your brand must continue.

One alternative is to outsource some or all of your marketing needs. I am not talking about hiring an ad agency or PR firm which you may already be using, I mean actually having many of your marketing functions handled by an outside person who’s not on your payroll but is dedicated to handling all your marketing as though they were an employee.

Many marketing consultants like me have worked at both large and small companies and have a wealth of experience that you can tap into at a fraction of the cost of an employee. This usually translates into 20 – 30 +/- hours a week devoted strictly to your business or working on a project by project basis.

Hiring the right part time outside marketing “partner” means that your marketing efforts continue without the overhead, health insurance, office space, etc. that come with regular employees. The money you save can either go right to the bottom line or directly back into the marketing budget.

Is hiring an outside marketing department right for every company? Of course not, but the bottom line is that your marketing absolutely must continue. If you can’t afford your own employee marketing department, then hire part time marketing one until the economy turns around.

For more information on the type of projects that you can outsource click here.

To Your Continued Success,

Dave

Smart business owners look at economic slowdowns as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.  They get tough and try to gain market share, not by spending more money, but by using innovative, low cost, high impact marketing tactics that get results.  Here are a few.

1 – Implement a Publicity Marketing Campaign
The local media are constantly looking for great stories that they can share with their listeners and readers.  All you need to do is give it to them.  If that sounds too simplistic, it’s not! 

The trick is to give the press something newsworthy.  They especially like “news” that falls into categories like: beating the odds, myth busting, revealing polls or surveys, interesting trends, free workshops and local charity events.

PR can get you what no form of advertising can – credibility and the ability to position yourself as the local expert in your field.

2 – Develop a Referral Marketing System
All business owners know how powerful referrals are, but few have any type of systematic referral program.  Companies believe that giving great service will automatically result in lots of referrals.  That’s simply not true!  The fact is, is that many people would give you referrals but t are too busy or just don’t remember.  That’s why it’s important to have a referral system that reminds and motivates people to refer you to others.

An inexpensive yet powerful strategy for getting more referrals is a simple “Thank You Card Program.”  People refer business professionals that they know, like, and trust.  What better way to do that than with a thank you card?

I use an on-line system called Send Out Cards, which lets me send out thank you and referral cards in my own handwriting.  They print it, stuff it, lick it, stamp it and send it for about a buck including postage.  Go here to learn more http://www.IncreaseReferralsASAP.com

No matter what system you use, be sure that you make it a habit to send thank you cards.  This simple and inexpensive method has the potential to increase your referrals dramatically.

3 – Engage in Joint Venture Marketing  Why not partner with another business that has already spent the money to get the customers that you want?  You’ll be surprised to know that many businesses will be glad to actually endorse your business to their customers.  That’s called joint venture marketing and is done every day by even the largest companies.

How does it work?  First, make a list of companies that market to your target customer.  Next, approach the owners of these businesses and ask them if they would like you to send a letter to all your customers endorsing their products and services.  Many will say, “Yes, but what’s the catch?”  Your answer is, “It’s simple, I’ll send an endorsement letter to my customers for you, if you send an endorsement letter to your customers for me.”

4 – Start a Continuity or Rewards Program
An easy way to increase sales is to implement a continuity program that offers a free or low cost reward to your customers to keep them coming back.

The first step is to look at what you sell that is “continuity-based.”  Create a special offer on those products.  For example, for every five oil changes, your customer gets a free oil change.  Next, create a continuity card that you “punch” when your customer purchases a product.  Then send out the card to all your customers with a letter explaining the program. 

Do continuity programs work?  From the credit cards you use to the airlines you fly, many companies entice you to buy their products using this “frequent buyer” method.

5 – Make Targeted Offers to Your Customers
The most valuable asset you have is your relationship with your current customers. Most businesses however don’t take full advantage of this.

You should make frequent targeted offers to your current customers.  If you have a customer that purchased product A, but didn’t buy product B, why not send them a letter with a special offer on those products?  You can also send an offer letter to those people who inquired about a specific product or service but never purchased it.  Perhaps the timing is better now for them to make the purchase.

To your continued success,
 
David Carleton
President, Street Smart Sales And Marketing
http://www.StreetSmartSalesAndMarketing.com