Coaching Your Clients In Contagious Marketing
Good morning, fellow coaches. I’ve been in two meetings in the last week in which the development of new Internet businesses was the exciting topic of discussion. Both of these discussions centered around developing Internet community sites for professionals in two distinct fields, with revenue generated through ad revenue based on click through traffic or on membership fees to the site and the cross selling of product revenue.
Each of the ideas was also relying on "viral marketing” to drive heavy traffic to the sites in a relatively short timeframe. The idea of viral marketing, as you probably know, is a bit like referral marketing on steroids. It takes place within established informal social relationships that are amplified by the connectivity of the Internet. Viral marketing occurs not when a person recommends that you go try a product or make an appointment to see a provider of a service, but instead when they just urge you to try an experience, whether it’s checking out a new type of ear buds or visiting an online community.
Malcolm Gladwell illustrated the concept in a couple of his recent books, but last year the concept was portrayed in mega fashion by MySpace and YouTube. These two sudden giants on the web grew essentially by viral marketing. No wonder the entrepreneurs I was meeting with were excited. But here are two essentials that I pointed out need to be in place if you’re going to begin a venture like this.
1. Be sure you have targeted a well defined group of consumers who are already gathering in a form of community. The idea is to leverage an “already felt” need to gather together online. It won’t work to try to create a new community from scratch. Find a people group that’s primed to become more connected. And, if at all possible, engage some people in your start up that are deeply and widely connected in this people group already. They will have key contacts and maybe access to hundreds if not thousands of people they can immediately refer into the new site to give it a surge of visitors/consumers right out of the gate.
2. Be sure you have a well designed site built with the right tools to give people the best experience possible from their first visit. Creating community type sites along the line of MySpace or Linked In requires design work that’s beyond the average storefront webpage. Personal profiles, audio/video personalization, blogging and forum capabilities all require second tier design work to perform well.
This is important, because if you build it, they will come, and if they have a poor experience, they will leave and start spreading another virus about you that you don’t want out there, namely that your exciting web community is a neighborhood to avoid.
Viral marketing online works well. So well that you need to be thoroughly prepared for success.
As always, if you have any stories or questions to share, I’d love to hear them!
Joe Pursch
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