SEM – Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing has a different positioning it can be the overhead of SEO or underly it depending from what point of view you are coming from.
Search engine marketing for me as a marketer is the use of a tool that will make all efforts for search engine to find your site online easier. SEO search engine optimisation is the way you present your page content to search engine. You spent a lot of time and effort of building your website you get passionate about it, you look at it with the great pictures the explicit content that gives your customer all information they need but hey nobody can find it. If you want to know more about SEO search engine optimisation look at the SEO page
Now SEM is there to add more to your marketing effort to be found online.
There are different tools that you may wish to use to be able to be found online. If we look at all different activities that can be implemented we can see that the online marketing activities are not different to the one offline, it’s the global marketing efforts that make it become
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others with the aim for the marketeer to have the message seen by thousands even millions of web surfers.
Also referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing” on the internet it is called viral marketing.
To make it understandable how it can work everybody will remember how hotmail got their message across with their get a free e-mail address and services by adding a short message attached to the mail. Every time a message was sent, the addressee could see under the signature the “get your free email” message.
So if you sent that message to 10 friends or colleagues and they again got their free e-mail address and send it again to 10 friends… see what happens?
Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy
Some viral marketing worked very well – on the iphone – the free beer game was amusing. However not all viral marketing work well. To understand how viral marketing works you need to put a strategy together, as seen with the Hotmail strategy it worked well because it was free. An effective viral marketing strategy will include some or all of these key points, the more the better:
Free products or services
“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. As an example we did in the US a give away software on a wall “It said “Take me – I’m free – it was midst of a wall of $9,99 and $12,99 blister pack software” Almost all people took the free software but also took another to pay for…. Free is good!
Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm).
Be careful with adjectives some do not work “Cheap” is not the same as “Free”! The idea is to create an interest that will be picked up by other people and create the “me-too” need and at the same time sell them something else.
Make it easy for people to be able to transfer the message
On the web this is the easiest part – a video with compelling content with an URL to click on, an e-mail message with a link, however the message needs to be short and understandable and if passed on no need to be explained.
Scalability of back-office
If your viral marketing takes off can you be sure that you can scale your servers to address the increasing demand? If not then take action to put this into place with your provider or your own web servers.
Understand motivation and utilise it
When I started to write this page I thought can Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs be included to understand the interaction on the Internet and the sociability that it will include.
As we know you can only go upward if each level starting from the bottom level is fulfilled.
So if the first level is the infrastructure of your computing environment, with webcam etc… the physiological need is fulfilled, you need to be safe IP protection, parental protection,that ’s level 2 then you go into the interaction with groups, chat (Facebook), ranting, raving (Twitter), then your own blog with comments where people start to utilise your knowledge this is the esteem level, and come to self actualisation through development of your own projects
Now if we understand how people want to be found, years ago it was common to hide behind a nickname the more obscure the better, now people go to linkedin, put their name and distribute their name – people want to be recognised!
Utilise existing communication networks
Why does Facebook have such a large number of visitors? simply because people are in search of recognition, love and communication at a low level – who cares that the friend (you never met because its the friend of a friend) was drunk last night? – So if you understand a little bit of Internet psychology with the need of communicating then you will understand about the relationships that are created online and why Facebook, Hi5 and other social media will work wonder for you.
Most people are social and on the Internet they develop networks of relationships. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs.
Use available resources
Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.
The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.
E-mail Marketing online
Videos
