Have advertising, PR, and direct sales sent you in a tailspin? Well have no fear! The potential for inbound marketing to make your business viral is here! Inbound Marketing teaches its students about “Viral Marketing and World Wide Raves” in its fifth training class that lends tips on how to make any business a viral and successful one.
The biggest obstacle that stops people from trying to go viral is fear. This fear takes on many forms. Fear 1: losing control of what has been published online and what the public can do with your content. Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University (IMU) points out that in order for something to go viral and experience a large amount of positive feedback, it needs to be out of control. This allows for the most honest spread of information. By initially providing some interesting content for free, businesses will increase the number of impressions they can make with a person’s web of connections. Eventually, that content will reach a crowd of people for free instead of just one paying customer. The idea is that the greater number of people exposed to the viral content, the greater number of people will be aware of the brand and become interested in being their customer. In the end, the spread of that free information equals more customers.
Fear 2: wasting resources on a campaign that does not go viral. No one has control over what content will become that widespread. While it is true that most of the intended “viral” content a company produces will not yield customer results, there have to be several failures amongst the few successes. IMU encourages companies to think of the resources spent creating these “failed” projects as part of the successes because eventually one of the projects is bound to earn great attention. Patience, planning, and persistence are essential to all viral marketing campaigns.
Going viral means companies have to rethink how they get attention. Out with the old advertising and PR, and in with the new viral inbound marketing! It will take some adjusting, but once businesses conquer their fears about losing control and wasting resources, going viral will yield great results.
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