Viral Marketing

As the owner of a business, you're likely looking for ways to increase your market share, to make your company bigger, to bring in more business, and to make more money. One of the major pillars of business is advertising, getting the word out about your company, convincing both past customers and people who've never been in to your business to pay for your product or service. The problem is, for smaller businesses, it can be prohibitively expensive to employ some of the more traditional advertising methods, such as radio or television spots.

Fortunately, there's a bold, new form of advertising that's being pioneered on the internet. Viral marketing, as it's called, attempts to take advantage of word-of-mouth to inform people about products. It can be difficult to get people to talk about your product, but if you're able to impress people on a certain level, the publicity will follow.

Viral marketing gets its name from the way it spreads across social networks over time, similar to a virus. The idea is to affect people on a real level so that they form an interest or attachment to a product outside of a traditional advertising way.

A good example of this was Burger King's Subservient Chicken, in which visitors to the website could type in requests on what they wanted a man dressed in a chicken suit to do. For example, if you typed in “dance,” the chicken would dance. People sent the link to family, friends, and coworkers, and Burger King got a lot of cheap advertising by taking advantage of people's curiosity. It's all about engaging consumers with the new.

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For more information on how to grow your company, contact the Austin business attorneys of Slater, Kennon & Pugh Ltd.LLP by calling 512-472-2431 today.