Category Archives: Viral marketing

What Can Make Your Infographic Go Viral?

Infographics, Small Business Marketing, Viral marketing, ,

The widely used tool of infographics have been taking an increasingly expansive share of the world’s web content as everyone from marketing specialists, governments, to scientists have begun to realize how much more effective visually engaging content can be. As marketing tools go, when created and shared effectively, infographics are by far one of the most useful tools in brand promotion with the potential to reach hundreds, thousands, or millions of viewers in a short time. To make your own infographic project simple and convincing, thus more shareable, follow these tips on creating the perfect viral infographic:

Set Your Goals

In various settings, we are most often striving to acquire new customers or to build our brand’s image and through marketing techniques, infographics set out to educate or entertain audiences to build an image. However, these two categories are actually quite wide in scope, so it’s best to narrow your goal further from there. With a goal to build your brand’s image, determine if you can narrow your goal to answering a common problem or showing statistical data that reveals trends, mysteries or scams as a part of your infographic. Such content has a great potential to go viral as it generates personal and emotional reactions to the subject.

Research, Research, Research

The research aspect of infographic creation requires research in a multitude of spheres. It is first critical to research your intended audience. Who do you want to reach and what do they care most about? During this research stage, you can also start to engage with this audience directly via social media. Follow them in all social channels, retweet their posts, thus initiating goodwill and a lubricating the soon-to-be-even-more-critical flow of information.

Research is also about finding credible sources from which you can harvest relevant information and data to add to the content of your infographic. It merits reiteration, so whether you collect data internally from:

  • Your own company
  • Your competitors
  • Public or social statistical databases
  • Annual reports of publically listed market leaders

Ensure that it is entirely credible. The debunking of facts in your infographic is a sure fire way to halt its viral movement across the interwebs.

Think Through the Design

First and foremost, your infographic needs both a persuasive header and an eye-catching overall design. These factors remain in your hands whether or not you choose to hire a professional designer for the job or to utilize free or paid online infographic creation software. For free software, start with visual.ly or Piktochart, but note that there are many other options if you cannot find a suitable template within these platforms.

And if you can’t seem to find the right design for your infographic, it might be the constraints of static two-dimensional space that prevent you from expressing your highly detailed and interconnected data. Bottom line, don’t rule out an animated infographic agency. As videos have arguably more viral potential than static graphics, if your infographic can be developed as an inspiring and informative video, that is obviously the way to go.

Saturate the Market

When you have your final product in hand, dedicate your marketing team to doing nothing but promoting it for the first few days. If you can saturate the market for only a week, you’ll secure more viral potential than if only one blog reposts your infographic weekly for the next month. Go both big and small with your infographic. Consider offering bigger platforms a 48 hour window of exclusivity with the content before you send it out to the wider public by engaging with smaller players through social media with whom you’ve hopefully already initiated some contact. Don’t be shy to ask everyone who shared your infographic to follow you and to reach out with a simple ‘Thanks for sharing!’ which goes a long way.

If you have some extra cash in your marketing budget, try paying for stumbles on StumbleUpon, as it’s really not expensive and can generate a significant number of likes, follows, and shares building desired viral content.

This guest-post was written by David Kovacs who is an online marketing enthusiast from Hungary and loves to share his thoughts and articles on various channels in topics related to marketing, business and SEO. If you have any question feel free to leave a comment or follow him on Twitter.

Why the Future of Marketing Is All About Helping

Blogging, Help marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing, YouTube Marketing, ,

The future of marketing is helping. Helping will bring you new customers, and forge trust in you and your brand for future customers. Jay Baer explains how and why the help marketing concept works here:

Transcript:

0:01 I’m going to try and make this
0:10 is entertaining as possible to start a full video watch this for me
0:16 in the right and yet he’s up
0:19 today we’re gonna show you how to remove viruses and spyware
0:22 your computer all home
0:27 the best way to remove viruses and spyware Caldwell where
0:30 video is awesome and you can see if amis it’s a guy
0:35 talking about mall so Geek Squad in addition to that sort of weird video
0:41 about viruses and spyware has YouTube channel the couple have 100
0:46 other videos on it all can you how to install Windows 8 not kinda crazy stuff
0:51 and I was at a conference
0:52 a few years ago and Robert Stevens who is the founder and Geek Squad was the
0:57 keynote and some in the audience
0:59ask him a question he was talking about the series videos
1:02 it’s Robert now let me see if I can get this straight
1:05 Geek Squad is in the business
1:09 fixing stuff for money it’s a kid that’s
1:14 that’s more or less what we do physical but you’ve got all these videos that
1:19 show people how to fix stuff themselves
1:22 how does that make any business sense at all in Stephen civil
1:27 you know first of all you gotta understand our best customers are the
1:32 people who think
1:33 they can fix it themselves
1:36 which is absolutely true right that is me I am I K
1:41 hot water heater repair in like four thousand dollars into trip to the
1:44 emergency room later we’re good to go
1:45 told effect and he said second of all eventually
1:49 everybody gets out of their depth right eventually you can’t do it yourself and
1:53 at that point who are you gonna call
1:55 but even a randomly dialed up the yellow pages or are you going to call Geek
1:59 Squad
1:59whose videos you’ve been looking at for 46
2:038 10 12 minutes because robert stevens a Geek Squad
2:09 understand a very important business principle
2:13 which is that the difference between helping
2:17 and Celine is just two letters
2:21 but those two letters make all
2:24 the difference in modern business
2:28 because if you sell something
2:32 you can create a customer today but if you help someone
2:37 you can create a customer
2:41 for life now so we’re going to talk about this evening
2:47 we are at a conference we’re talking a lot
2:50 about content and content creation and marketing automation
2:55 in feeding information to customers but the reality is
3:00 the content that will be effective is content that is truly
3:05 and inherently useful and I call that information
3:10 a utility yooo utility
3:14 and the definition of utility is simple it’s just this its market team that is
3:19 so useful
3:20 people would pay for it
3:24 now you’re not going to actually make them pay for that would be bold
3:28 but it’s so useful that if you ask them to you they actually work
3:33 me give you an example Hilton Hotels has a program
3:39 on Twitter called act Hilton suggests
3:43 they started as a couple years ago as a trial program they
3:47 they took 25 hotels across the United States took a volunteer from each ot
3:51 else was on a full-time job it was in addition to the regular duties
3:54 is that who’s we want you to do we want to listen on Twitter
3:57 pay attention to what’s been said on Twitter and if you can find a way to
4:01 help
4:02 just help so that’s what they did
4:07 here’s an example at Lt Houston
4:12 says on Twitter good places to eat your the Magnolia Hotel
4:17 downtown Dallas on Saturday Hilton suggest
4:21 jumps into this conversation note that this was an address templeton
4:25 they just thought they were strategically eavesdropping
4:28 if you will they saw this they leaped into the conversation said hey at LT
4:32 Houston
4:33 wild salsa on major camp easy’s on elmer awesome
4:36 both within walking distance of your hotel in Dallas enjoy
4:42 but here’s the fat the Magnolia Hotel
4:47 is not a Hilton property so now you have Hilton Hotels using staff time and staff
4:53 resources
4:54 to assist somebody that they know for a fact is not
4:57 a customer but eventually this guy’s gonna be in a different city and your
5:02 hotel recommendation
5:03 and at that point who’s it gonna think I’m first
5:06 Hilton because they helped him when
5:10 he needed it it’s a utility
5:15 a couple days later Melanie J who was at Rockstar
5:18 extreme on Twitter tweeted out
5:21 anybody know who’s hiring in Orlando for professional positions at this time
5:25 seems like it’s at a standstill
5:29 Hilton suggest jumps into that and says at Rockstar extreme check out Orlando
5:33 jobs dot com for a comprehensive list now
5:36 no I think what I would have said is Haley Melanie maybe if your Twitter
5:39 handle wasn’t at Rockstar extreme
5:42 you would have some additional interviewed maybe this is sending the
5:45 wrong message
5:48 it’s just one of many reasons I’m not in customer service
5:51 but now they’re trying to help her find a job and eventually maybe she’s gonna
5:55 get a job and he’s gonna have disposable income
5:57 and she’s going to want to travel and he’s going to need a hotel and at that
6:00 point
6:01 who is she gonna pinko first
6:04 Hilton because they helped her when she needed help.

Learn How To Implement Effective Content Marketing For Global Success

Content creation, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing, YouTube Marketing, , ,

The world of marketing is changing rapidly. In the information age, traditional methods of advertising have begun to lose their luster, forcing companies to raise the bar on how they market their brands and products. Central to this new advertising paradigm is content marketing: attracting customers not by “selling” them a brand, but instead by creating interesting, entertaining, or compelling content that will guide customer behavior without making an explicit sales pitch. Many large brands are now making effective use of content marketing to change the way customers engage with their brand.

Vouchercloud®

When it comes to variety, Vouchercloud® offers instant delivery of money-saving coupons on mobile devices and voucher codes for online shopping. The use of social media and YouTube is to showcase its content marketing and is delivered well. Check out this video below, that silently showcases a family enjoying the benefits of Vouchercloud® as they travel through a fictional restaurant meal, train ride, and movie theater — all without making a traditional sales pitch. Videos such as these showcase the benefits of services that Vouchercloud offer without the need for spokespeople or even explanations of their services, instead focusing on a brief, entertaining video that shows customers what their service is all about and the discounts they can save.

Timex®

For its iconic IRONMAN brand, venerable watch company Timex® knew it had to break out of its traditional advertising practices and focus on a new kind of marketing. They eventually unveiled the “I am a Runner” campaign, choosing to focus not on the products themselves, but on the storytelling opportunities involved in running and the Ironman challenge. Timex® already had a strong connection to the Ironman running challenge, and so capitalized on that connection by creating a Facebook app that collected runners’ stories and photos and allowed real athletes to share their experiences.

Burberry®

Clothing company Burberry®, one of the oldest fashion brands in the industry at 157 years, sought to freshen up their market image and take some new approaches to advertising. Investing heavily in digital advertising, Burberry® launched two projects. The Burberry® Acoustic project, unveiled in 2010, featured a series of videos showcasing up-and-coming British musicians (all wearing Burberry® clothing, of course), and the Burberry® Kisses project involved a website that allowed users to capture their unique “kiss print” on their computer webcams, modify the kisses with virtual “lipstick,” and then share with others. The focus on customer engagement and participation spread awareness of Burberry’s iconic brand.

Red Bull®

One of the most memorable and resonant content marketing campaigns in recent memory has come from Red Bull®. The energy drink company took its slogan (“Red Bull gives you wings”™) to the limit when, as the centerpiece to their “Stratos” campaign, they sent daredevil Felix Baumgartner into space to perform a record-breaking dive from low orbit. The video of the jump, which showed Baumgartner’s successful plummet to earth at Mach 1.25, garnered over eight million simultaneous live streams on YouTube. The photos of Baumgartner’s landing on Facebook gathered over 200,000 “likes” within minutes of its posting. Red Bull created massive awareness for its brand and raised the bar for content marketing everywhere, without turning the Stratos event into a commercial.

The scale and scope of Red Bull’s® marketing efforts have raised the bar for other content marketers worldwide — not every company, obviously, can afford to send a man into space to promote their products. But in the world of content marketing, ingenuity and creativity frequently trump limitless budgets and high production values, and with enough inventiveness, even the most modest content marketing effort can achieve a massive audience.

Author: Hannah is a writer who works alongside the travel, fashion and food brands for vouchercloud.com. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on content marketing for success and any tips you may have.

Animated Short Films are the Way to Go for Online Video Marketing

animated video, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing, , , ,

Animated videos have become a mainstay in online video marketing but not many companies have gotten it right.  Chipotle is an exception! If you haven’t seen these videos by Chipotle then you’ve missed, not only a great marketing campaign, but emotionally charged videos with a great message behind them. This is exactly what people want to share online, something that’s short, gets a point across, emotional and thought provoking.  Chipotle is leading the way with online video marketing but they’re also taking a step in the right direction by taking a moral and eco-friendly stand by utilizing locally based and minimally processed foods.

Here is the first one they made in 2012 called “Back to the Start” which won the 2012 Cannes Grand Prix:

Here is the follow up animated short film called “Scarecrow” which I believe will win another award:

Both videos were made in conjunction with CAA Marketing.

By Peter Marino, the owner and CDO of reelWebDesign.com and SocialMediaMarketing.co, both of which are website development and social media marketing companies in NYC.

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