The three keys to viral marketing
Viral marketing isn’t a term often used in the mortgage industry, probably because many people believe it’s too difficult to achieve viral-like results in an ultra-competitive marketplace and the concept really only exists in online marketing. However, thinking “outside the box” may lead you to alternative approaches in your marketing that can achieve viral symptoms. So what makes marketing viral anyway? There are three basic keys we’ll discuss in this article.
Viral Marketing Key 1: Make it easy to pass on
Think of a virus - it easily transfers from host to host usually via air or touch. Viral marketing gets it’s name because the marketing material is easily passed from one person to another and so your viral marketing campaign must include a way to get your material from one person to another, the easier the better.
When a customer visits your website and finds some aspect of it really cool, do you have a way for them to quickly and easily share it with their friends and associates? If not, find a way to do it because otherwise you may not be maximizing the investment you’ve made in your mortgage website. A feature that lets site visitors “share with a friend” is a good example.
Viral Marketing Key 2: Make it buzz-worthy
This is the hard part when it comes to creating effective viral marketing campaigns in the mortgage industry. If you are trying to attract potential customers to your mortgage website and ultimately get them to sign up for your newsletter or request a rate quote then you need to think of something edgy that will get your target market to be interested and to share it with others. If your site has nothing buzz-worthy about it, odds are your site visitors will not share it with others.
Viral Marketing Key 3: Make it useful
Suppose you have something on your website that can be easily shared and is buzz-worthy, but it is not useful in any way to the person who gets an email about it from their friend or colleague. The virus ends and is not passed along to other people, much like many of the annoying emails that get forwarded to you from time to time (you know what I’m talking about). So be sure to make your item useful in some way.
So to summarize, if you want to create an online marketing piece for your mortgage business that acts viral you need to:
- Make it easy to pass on
- Make it buzz-worthy
- Make it useful to your target market