Marshall Yard:

Thinking back about ten years ago, I recall doing mass mailings and postcard campaigns to prospective clients.  Running to the post office and trying to get everything out by your deadline.  Marketing has taken a completely different turn in the last few years, by way of social networking.  Where do we go to look for information? How many times a day do we tend to run to our computers to look something up? Even when we are interested in finding the best trade shows for our product and services, we head to the internet. 

I recently spent several days reading and catching up on all the events that happened at CES 2008, the largest consumer electronic trade shows. Spending several hours reading and keeping in touch with the upcoming trends can be a time consuming task.  With all of the new sites that pop up each and every day online that can give you an avenue for your marketing strategies, it is something that we should all be considering, and that manpower is needed for all the facets of social marketing.

Viral Marketing is defined as marketing that propagates itself, this type of marketing is at full throttle around all of us, it is quite an interesting but simple concept and trying to explain it to anyone that is not familiar with it becomes a rough and often times lonely road.  When you begin the process of this type of marketing, you will feel as if you are beginning to swim all over again.  There are several groups and forums to join and read, and this is where the masses of the internet marketers, search engine marketing & search engine optimization experts all hang out. 

Some take this to extremes and solely rely on cyberspace campaigns for marketing these days, is that smart, if you are in that business it is, if you know a lot of the heavy hitters among the forums and boards and top social sites, you can reach far more people than anyone that has just ventured into this type of marketing.  I believe that with most marketing campaigns a bit of balance is needed – continue with your print advertisement, exhibiting at trade shows, mass mailings and viral marketing.  All of these elements can get exposure and introduce you to prospects that may have been overlooked.

Viral Marketing is a tough campaign to sell to anyone that is from the old school, and relying solely on what they are familiar with.  Start out small, show the effects, keep logs of your success and failures, if this becomes a passion and you are enthralled at the outcome and the social contacts that are to be had, continue to push forward.  

Tags: Marketing, social networking, viral marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Advertising, Marketing, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.