Take A Closer Look At Your Lead Magnet

 

The previous post gave you a pretty good overview over where your opt-in and auto-responder are right now. Now that you have a general overview, and a list of things you want to fix and change, it’s time to take a closer look at the first piece of the puzzle… your lead magnet. This is the “thing” you are giving away as a thank you when people join your list. It’s the carrot you dangle in front of them and how you invite them to become a subscriber. 

 

It’s a good idea to change the lead magnet from time to time, and even more important that you make sure it’s something of value that’s interesting to your readers. That’s why it’s a good idea to start with your target audience in mind. You don’t necessarily want to appeal to the largest audience. Instead, you want to attract the right people who will love your products and recommendations. In short, you want your free list to be made up of future customers. Do you know who those people are? If not, now is a great time to figure that out and get it clear in your mind. 

 

Once you know who your ideal customer is, think about where they are at right now. I’m not talking about location here. Think about where they are at in live, pertaining to what you have to offer and where they want to go. For example, you could build an audience of parents of toddlers who are just starting to potty train. Their goal is of course to get the kid out of diapers for good and that can pose quite the challenge. Think about what some of the early questions these people ask themselves or what problems they face. In this example, the parent may be wondering when the right time to start potty training is and if there are signs that their child is ready. 

 

Spend a little time today to brainstorm some ideas for questions and solutions around this whole concept for your own target audience. Along the way, think about how your existing lead magnet fits into that picture. Is it a good fit? If not, it may be time to come up with a new lead magnet. Think about format as well. Is a short report that’s downloadable as a pdf attractive to your market? Or would they prefer a video course or interactive quiz? Look at what your competition or others who target the same audience are doing and consider going a similar route. 

 

In the end, don’t be afraid to create multiple new lead magnets and test them out to see which one performs best for you. It’s time well spent when you find the opt-in offer that helps explode your list growth. 

Sign Up For Your Own List And Review The Process

Are you ready to audit your list and find out what’s working, what isn’t, and where there’s room for improvement? If you ask me, it’s one of the most productive and rewarding tasks you can tackle this week. It all starts by taking a closer look at what you have in place right now. 

 

Be honest. When is the last time you’ve really taken a look at your opt-in form? How about your welcome email? Do you know what it says and how you’re welcoming your new subscribers? How about the lead magnet you’re using? It’s time to take stock of all that and the first step is to sign up for your own list. 

 

You can sign up with any email and it will work just fine. I prefer a Gmail account that I’ve set up just for this purpose. It allows me to see all my auto-responder emails for various lists in one place. The reason I chose Gmail (aside from the fact that it’s free and easy to access anytime, anywhere), is that it’s very searchable. This comes in handy when you’re trying to find one particular email that needs changing or updating. You can search for it in your Gmail using a keyword instead of digging through your auto-responder series trying to find it. 

 

Keep pen and paper next to you as you get ready to sign up for your own list. We’ll address some of these things in more detail this week, but start to pay attention and try to look at each piece of the process from your subscribers’ point of few. How attractive is the opt-in offer? Is the headline catchy? Do you help your readers solve a problem with your lead magnet and the content you provide in your emails? Are you hitting on pain points in your copy? How attractive is the graphic? 

 

As you’re signing up, look at how easy and smooth the process is. Look at and reevaluate how much information you’re asking for. Are the landing page and opt-in email making sense? Are there things you could improve or clarify? Does it fit with the overall look and feel of the rest of your site? Do you have any distractions on the opt-in confirmation page and email? Do your readers know what to expect? 

 

Once you confirm your opt-in, you should land on a Thank You or download page. Make sure you have it set up and are using it to your advantage. It should be easy to find the lead magnet download file, but this isn’t the only thing you can do here. Start to think about using this space to create a relationship with your readers and to turn them into customers. We’ll go into more detail on this in a subsequent post. Of course, you should make sure all the links on this page work. You don’t want to make a bad first impression. 

 

Last but not least, head to your email account and review the welcome email you received. Going forward, look at each message in your auto-responder sequence as it comes in. Make sure the links are working, the offers are still valid and the messages make sense. Change and tweak as needed. 

 

That’s it for the first post. In the next post, we take a closer look at the lead magnet and how well it’s working when it comes to drawing new subscribers into your funnel. 

Your E-book is your Viral Salesman

 

E-books are the future and the future is now. The printed word on paper and bound into books used to be the only way information was given and received. They were great, you could take them with you and put them on shelves and they do still exist and will continue to for the foreseeable future but the time of the E-book has arrived. 

 

The marketing E-book is a slightly different animal from just an E-book. Marketing E-books contain text, images, links to web pages and navigation controls. The marketing E-book has become a very important part of marketing on the Internet. 

 

With a marketing E-book you can present your story in an effective way and include links to your web sales pages. Your E-book can become your best salesman. 

 

First, your E-book needs to be interesting and informative. It always has links back to your web site and to your sales page. 

 

Next, be sure that you have a prominent section telling readers that they are free to give your E-book away. Let them know that they can post it on their site as a free download, that they can use it as a bonus, and that they can bundle it with other products. This is the way to create viral marketing for your products or services. Remember those links back to your site contained in the E-book?

 

Last but certainly not least before you send your E-book out to the world, double check spelling and grammar and be sure that you have tested every link to verify that it goes where it is supposed to go. Obvious errors will reflect badly on you and will not be of much value to you, it could even by damaging. 

 

Post your E-book to some of the E-book directories. Many let you post it for free, or will let you post a link on their site to your E-book.

Why and How E-mail Viral Marketing Works

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands and then to millions.

 

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. Viral e-mail marketing works great on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format makes copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. Remember the K.I.S.S. standard…. Keep it Simple Stupid. The shorter and easier to remember is always better than long and complicated.  

 

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. The desire to be cool and greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages.

 

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. 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.

 

If you can design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, you have a winner.

 

What Works & What Doesn't in Viral Marketing

Stop with the enforced e-mail forwards already! Trying to force or bribe people to forward your info to a friends or family in order to be rewarded or win looks skanky in today's ultra-permission-based world. Especially when you tell visitors nothing about their friend's or family’s privacy in the space directly next to the e-mail form. 

 

A true viral campaign gets forwarded because consumers are compelled to do so by the glory of the content, not because you bribed them with points or something else. 

 

What absolutely will not work:

 

Suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and family will not work. Adding a line at the bottom of your e-mail that reads “Please feel free to forward this message to a friend” is more likely to get it deleted than forwarded. 

 

What absolutely will work: 

 

Offering something worthy of sharing like a valuable discount, vital information or offering an incentive for sharing like additional entries into a sweepstakes or an added discount or premium service will work. 

 

Relevant or timely information, research, or studies that are included in your e-mail might encourage the recipients to share with their family and friends. Interactive content like a quiz or test, especially if it’s fun, will inspire forwarding.

 

Jokes and cartoons are almost always forwarded to everybody the recipient knows.  Why?  Because they are entertaining and entertainment is meant to be shared.

 

A really cool multimedia experience is always going to achieve a lot of pass-along. Rich media is new and the novelty and tech factors alone are often enough to make the e-mail recipient eager to share it.

 

Oops!  Almost forgot one really important thing….You can craft a brilliant e-mail following all the rules, but if a consumer visits your site and has an experience less that what was promised, you are going to achieve viral marketing, alright…the bad kind.  So be certain that your product or service is ready and is as advertised.

 

What an E-book Can Do for You

An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your message by willing participants.

 

This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site. 

 

Using viral E-books as a marketing method is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s even quicker if you use rebrandable E-books that have been written by others. Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search. You will find many rebrandable E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business. One method of distributing the E-book is to offer it to visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family it will promote your business for you. 

 

E-books are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited only by the enthusiasm of the participants. 

 

E-books are fairly easy to create. It’s possible to produce your own E-books by combining articles that you have written or have gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.

 

A common approach is to use material that has Private Label Rights, including articles and reports that have been written specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Using a portion of a larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters of a large E-book could also be used as a viral E-book.

  

Viral Marketing using Forums

There are different types of forums, beyond the obvious topical types, of “marketing” or “special interest”, etc. “Marketing” and “special interest” are two types of what are commonly referred to as “open forums”.

 

There are, however, business and professional forums, which do not operate under the same rules and, more often than not, disallow any and all types of advertising or self-promotion. Forums that have been created to support the membership of a particular program are especially adamant on this topic and often demand that all members refrain from all types if advertising on their sites.

 

Still, even with all these hurdles, it is possible to successfully advertise in forums. In all cases a pre-requisite for success is developing a good reputation and a good relationship and maintaining both. So, while it is true that this a form of free advertising, it does require a certain amount of investment as far as time and energy are concerned, not to mention subtly and finesse. 

 

To successfully market on any forum, the first requirement is to take a personal interest in the main topic of the forum. That means visiting it on a regular basis and developing a good relationship with the members and the moderators. It, also, means taking an active roll in the conversations and being willing to help others. Of course, it goes without saying that it means abiding by any and all rules that exist. In this way, one can develop a reputation, and business will just naturally develop because humans tend to work with people they trust.

 

Since the main purpose of a forum is the exchange of information and/or ideas, marketers must respect that objective and abide by it. Marketing forums, where everyone there has something to advertise and sell, usually have even more stringent rules. 

 

Viral Marketing Goes Mobile

Mobile devices, mobile phones and PDA’s are one of the last great frontiers of viral advertisement opportunities. However, we have become experts at filtering everything, our air and water, our e-mail and pop-ups, and our mobile devices as well. We are good at filtering.

 

The very idea of unwanted advertising streaming through our Blackberries is abhorrent. Mobile devices are the ultimate opt-in medium and, therefore, a great way for marketers to connect with users…if that’s what the users want. “WANT” is the key word here. How should marketers approach the medium? 

 

There are three main ways to achieve this. They are:

 

1. Offer exclusive content. Anyone can offer ring tones. It’s the unique content, such as exclusive mobile images of new brand concepts, that drives interest and calls them out in other media like e-mail campaigns, newsletters, websites, etc. So a wireless campaign is most effective when it offers exclusive content for wireless devices. 

 

2. Make it useful and timely. Think about what would be handy and helpful to have on a mobile device. Last year, for example, Food Network enabled Sprint customers to download shopping lists for their Thanksgiving dinners. There was a lot of “Sprint-envy” going around among non-sprint customers. 

 

3. Clearly define objectives. Usually, one of two business objectives drives successful mobile experiences: incremental revenue of brand intimacy. On the intimacy factor, a text message usually takes priority over almost any other form of communication. Why? Because we haven’t yet been saturated with mobile spam, and this is what causes us to prioritize wireless messaging over voice.

 

Mobile marketing has been out there for a while but we marketers have new territory to explore. Video offers fantastic opportunities for engagement. Consumers already bypass their filters for highly useful or entertaining content and will do so for rich exclusive, compelling content. 

 

Using Videos in Viral Marketing

More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated.  Online video advertising is really taking off. Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment. It is true that video formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth all of that if they achieve greater response rates. 

 

Where to use online video if wishing to maximize its effect, is what advertisers must carefully consider. Video to be used on the Internet should be information and communication focused while video to be used on television should be focused on entertainment.  

 

Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising. Right now, most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups. Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements. 

 

Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance of interesting consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.

 

Whatever you come up with, don't forget to make it easy to open and distribute. File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you get people to spread it like wildfire?

 

Also, if you've made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as an attachment rather than stream it. It's cheaper and, if you're not hosting it, it's more viral, too.

 

Using Forums in Viral Marketing

Recently, forum marketing has been touted as a kind of free, organic, viral marketing. But because so many marketers go into forums purely with the intention of marketing products or services, their actions and attitude unwittingly causes the exact opposite of the desired effect.

 

Forums aren’t marketplaces but when used as such, the marketers’ actions become offensive and will only inspire the wrath of fellow members and marketers, not to mention moderators who can ban them from the site with the click of their mouse.

 

In order to be effective, this kind of marketing carries a certain degree of commitment, responsibility and respect. The first requirement is to take a personal interest in the main topic of the forum. Not only does that mean visiting it regularly, but it also means developing a good relationship with both other members and the moderators, as well as taking an active interest in helping others. Of course, it also means abiding by and all rules that exist. By doing this, one can develop a reputation and, since it is human nature to work with a trusted colleague, business will naturally develop from this.

 

This type of marketing has already suffered some abuse and because of this, many forums have recently developed stringent rules designed to protect their members from abusive or overly-aggressive marketing tactics. One forum grants .sig files only after a member has created one hundred valid posts and another has disallowed ads in sig files altogether. 

 

Marketers must respect that the purpose of a forum is to be a platform to exchange ideas on a given topic. It is not there to advertise products and services. By focusing on the topic and posting questions and answers, a marketer’s reputation will grow and this creates the potential for sales naturally. 

 

Using File Sharing in Viral Marketing

There are probably ten million people online, looking for downloads at any given time. Of course, a lot of them could be looking for free music or software but still, reaching a minimum on a million people on any given day does offer some rather intriguing possibilities. 

 

People like using file services to download music for two simple reasons, they’re free, and there is an incredible selection. The fact is Pandora’s Box has been opened. In Napster’s wake, other quasi-legal services quickly emerged… a lot of them. Even if they are closed, others will succeed them. 

 

Major record companies would like to thing otherwise but they are never going to stop file sharing. Net users are file sharers…plain and simple. Long before the Internet came into being, people made cassette tapes of their favorite music for their friends…cd burners are so much easier and faster. 

 

So how can you use this to help your viral marketing campaign along? Think about this. Once someone downloads your MP3 files and those files are available on that listener’s hard drive, viral marketing begins. After two users start sharing your files, suddenly, your music is on the hard drive of a second computer…then a third… and on and on. When users are searching and they find your music on a lot of different computers, they are more likely to download the files. It’s just a matter of time before you’ll find your files showing up in more and more places.

 

 No matter what genre music you play…Rock and Roll, Country, Tejano, Mozart sonatas, Heavy Metal, of Brazilian Jazz, there is an audience for it somewhere.

 

In this new paradigm, you aren’t hawking a product, you are offering free music via a medium that lets you be directly connected with your audience. 

 

Using E-Mail to Achieve Objectives

Viral marketing is an integral part of a campaign strategy that is used to achieve objectives. It is not the objective itself. If the main objective of an e-mail campaign is branding, in order to achieve greater branding success exposure, you craft your message or offer in a way that it encourages pass-along. 

 

Producing a message with a quality offer or an incentive for pass-along is what viral marketing is all about. 

 

Just suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and relatives is not viral marketing. A message at the bottom of your e-mail that reads “Feel free to forward this message to a friend” is nowhere close to viral marketing at its best.

 

On the other hand, if something worthy of sharing, such as a valuable discount, vital information, additional entries into a sweepstakes, an added discount or premium service, a joke/cartoon, or a hilarious video, is included in the e-mail, viral marketing happens naturally and quite successfully. 

 

The bottom line is that your message must be perceived as having value. Relevant or timely information, research, or studies are all good examples of content that might be viewed as potential pass-along material. Interactive content like a quiz or text can inspire forwarding, especially if it is fun. Personality tests, fitness quizzes, or compatibility questionnaires are all things that have been passed on by many people many times. Why? Because they are entertaining and entertainment has value.

 

A multimedia experience is always going to achieve some pass-along. Someone is always touting the benefits. It is a bit more of a time and money investment but the messages have a great appeal and rich media has the advantage of being new. The tech factor alone is often enough for the message to be perceived as valuable.

Using Chat Rooms in Viral Marketing

Spamming chat rooms or instant messaging systems with undifferentiated marketing messages is certainly not a very good idea. But if they are used the right way, these channels can be great to communicate with the market - especially to establish a dialogue with customers. 

 

Have you ever been to a chat room and posted a message. If you have then you may learn some free web-advertising secrets on how to market your products and service in chat rooms. Chat rooms are usually broken into categories. You will need to find the right chat room where your targeted audience would gather. If there isn’t one, them you may need to create one.

 

It will be of no use to create one that is obviously for the sole purpose of selling your product or service. Rather, it needs to attract people who would be interested in your product or service. For example: If you sell garden products, your chat room should be on the subject of gardening and not the brand name of the products you sell.  

 

Another way to use a chat room to promote your business is to include a chat room on your web site. Host a free online seminar in your own chat room about a subject of your expertise. Use your chat room to meet with your current customers and answer any questions or address and problems they may have. Regularly schedule free events in your chat room and be certain that your customers are made aware of when they will occur.

 

For example, you might have an expert in the field available to answer questions on a certain day and between certain hours. You might, also, host other people’s chat rooms as an expert yourself. You, of course, could charge for this but it might be wise to do it free to gain publicity.

 

The Many Facets of Viral Marketing

In the beginning, e-mail was the one way that viral marketing was started. Since that long ago day, viral marketing has gone from a marketing strategy to an art form and there are many ways to accomplish the objective of creating a successful viral marketing campaign. Seven of those ways are:

 

1. E-mail: It was first but it is still around and still used. It is, however, getting a little harder to use as more and more government restrictions are placed on it. Still… it does work.

 

2. Newsletters: This is an extension of e-mail but it a very effective tool. If you include enough timely and valuable information, a good newsletter can drive up the number of visits to your website.

 

3. Blogging: Providing the tools on your website to enable bloggers to interact with one another is a terrific way to get the message about your product of service out there and being talked about. Bloggers have their ears to the ground for new products and services. 

 

4. Chat Rooms: A chat room on your website can and does encourage interaction among your customers and that can’t be a bad thing. Also, you can use the chat room to schedule special events like having an expert available to answer questions on a given day at a given time.

 

5. Tell-a-friend Script: If you add this with a statement saying that e-mail addresses supplied will never be shared with third parties, you can increase your potential customer list greatly.

 

6. Video Clips: Including cool video clips on your website will keep the interest up and increase traffic.

 

7. Flash Games: Although they are a little costly to start, they are an extremely effective tool to get your viral marketing campaign going. Once they are launched, they require nothing more from you. 

 

Successful Forum Viral Marketing

 

In order to be successful using forums to do viral marketing there are some things that are required.  

 

Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research.

 

1. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many types of forums could apply….everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home moms. 

 

2. Choose popular forums.  There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this.

 

3. Choose forums that allow sig tags.  If it’s possible read the rules before joining and pay attention to them. Your time is important, too.  It is better to find out that a forum doesn’t allow posts with sig tags before you go to the time and trouble of joining.

 

After You Have Joined: OK…you have chosen two or three forums that meet your requirements…now what?

 

1.  Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly.  The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website.

 

2.  Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This all but a universal rule and only displays the marketers lack of experience if he does so.  At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors….at worst, it is grounds for being banned.

 

3.  Work the room.  Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there and take the time to get to know the users. Take the time to introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic. 

 

As a marketer becomes a regular member, they will hopefully develop a good reputation and without saying a word about their promotion, those who are interested in their product will approach them.

 

Start Viral Marketing Campaigns Using E-books

Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It is, also, a powerful way to generate traffic to your website.

 

Think about how a virus spread from one person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to. 

 

Now let’s look at using an E-book to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an E-book… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

 

Before you know it, the E-book is spreading across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free E-book. 

 

Make certain that you let people know that they have permission to forward the E-book around the Internet. When you create the E-book, you have the right to give people certain rights. One of those rights could be that you allow them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away. 

 

You can write the E-book yourself, use private label content or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are a lot of ways to create an E-book. Once you have your E-book written, use software to create your E-book.

 

Humor Turns E-Mail Viral

A study by Sharpe Partners, an interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet users in America share content with others via e-mail. This is excellent news for those companies who use self-propelling word-of-mouse” e-mail techniques to sell their products.

 

The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded, as well.  The most popular content is humorous material.

 

The second most popular category is news, followed by healthcare and medical information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies… in that order. So it is easy to see that humor is the best content for your viral e-mail campaign.  

 

Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an e-mail to insure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them laugh.

 

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an advertisement.  

 

Not along ago, about 35 million people got an e-mail containing a picture taken in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone in front of the famous Cinderella Castle.  The title of the picture was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral e-mail advertising Disneyland and used the edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious… and it works.

 

I’d guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture… and thus the advertisement for Disneyland.  The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it. 

 

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign.

 

Houston Museum of Natural Science Went Viral

The Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) was one chosen to showcase the world-famous Exhibition for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. HMNS quickly realized that while the exhibit was expected to generate a great deal of interest, it didn’t have a lot of appeal for their core audience.  The success of the exhibition, therefore, would rest in how it was marketed.

 

The Houston Museum of Natural Science quickly called in Spur Digital to help reach the targeted demographic audience and generate interest in the Exhibit. HMNS was, also, hoping to acquire new patrons and members to further their future revenue. 

 

Spur digital worked with HMNS to identify the target market for the campaign and developed an integrated online media plan to reach those audiences. The campaign featured an online contest that was marketed through targeted online media outlets including relevant Web sites, Search Engines and third-party E-mail lists. Viral marketing was an important component of the campaign, so Spur developed an innovative strategy to get people to refer their friends. 

 

Spur identified the target audience as males 18 to 34 years old who were fans of action and fantasy films, frequent video game players and movie renters, tech-savvy who generally didn’t hang out at museums. Based on this information, Spur chose search engine advertisements that would accompany specific search words, dedicated e-mail advertisements, sponsored e-mail advertisements, banner ads on web sites targeted toward the desired audience, and e-mails to the HMNS list. 

 

Did it work?  You bet!  The results were excellent. The impact of the viral marketing effort was astounding - over 23% of registrants came originated from the Tell-A-Friend feature. The direct marketing efforts yielded impressive results as well. In total, the 12-week, locally-targeted online campaign yielded more than 2 million targeted impressions, 40,000 unique visits, almost 12,000 and 6,000 invitations sent by friends at a cost per action of less than $3.00. These contributed to the record attendance of almost 100,000 over 3 months.