Viral Marketing: The Old Dog Learns New Tricks
What’s the difference between promoting conventional software and marketing a Web 2.0 hosted service? Eighteen months ago I would have said, “Not much.” A year and a half later I know the real answer. It’s “everything!”
I mentioned earlier that I was used to marketing big ($100k and up) software applications to Fortune 1000 corporations. Once you established your sales process, you simply repeated it over and over. Identify key decision makers in target prospects and preface the sales call with a marketing campaign. For many companies, the post-sale activities alone amounted to a license to print money. Installation – extra; train the customer’s staff on how to use the product – extra; annual maintenance and support – mandatory 20% per year. I was thoroughly versed in how software vendors generate their revenue.
So now I’m firmly planted in the Web world and I know that model is totally irrelevant. But it took a while to adjust, and I’m still learning. I just couldn’t get my arms around the concept of building an application, putting it out there in the clouds, and expecting people to visit it. Or use it and pay for it! Although we have a potential audience of 450 million or so Excel users, how would they know we even existed?
Fortunately I met a business expert who specializes in viral marketing for the Web. It’s good that she agreed to work with us because the only thing I knew of “viral” related to a Doctor’s visit. In contrast to my traditional software model where sales were handled face-to-face and one-on-one, the viral model depended on many-telling-many-more. With no personal contact, we work with a variety of techniques to grow that kind of word-of-mouth chain. The tools of this trade include keyword optimization, bookmarks, referral sites, blogs, affiliate programs and much, much more. And there are hundreds – thousands – of sites that publish news, articles, and reviews of the latest, greatest things to hit the Net, like eXpresso!
Viral marketing really works and we’re seeing the fruits of our efforts. Every day, more and more visitors come to our site, subscribe, and use eXpresso. I’m far from an expert, but for now, I believe I passed my Web Marketing 101 course, and had fun doing it.
OI