The buzzword for viral marketing and “word of mouth” is common and popular among web 2.0. Using social media, you can create brand awareness towards your brand identity, and increase your product sales through viral marketing. Here are some tips and tricks on how to go viral.

1. E-mail Marketing – E-mail marketing can go viral too. Just look at the loads of e-mail memes and chains that get passed around from inbox to inbox. You can use this to your advantage by manipulating your e-mail newsletters to make it easier to go viral. Make sure you include share links in your newsletter to make it easier for people to spread and share. Adding links to your other web presences will also help tie everything together and get more traffic to your business. Make sure you cross your t’s and dot your i’s by in turn, promoting your e-mail newsletter on your website, facebook, twitter, etc.
2. Host Contests – This can be done in many ways. Two of the common platforms are through blogging and Twitter. You can create your own Twitter hashtag to track the contest tweets and watch your tweets go viral as people find out about the offer and retweet. The key is to have an exciting product or offer to giveaway that people will actually want. You can combine both twitter and blogging by linking to the blog giveaway post and promoting it through twitter. Many companies find influential bloggers that have high social networking potential to host their products through a giveaway.
3. Appeal to Emotions – Your message has to stand out and appeal to the emotions. This is the number one way to create a good viral marketing message. Equal parts psychology and marketing strategy, the message has to stand out in people’s minds. Your message will not go viral unless it stops people in their tracks, and is powerful enough to make people want to share it. Your message needs to have a strong emotional connection with the reader. One way to do this is to create a public service announcement or tie it in to a charity or cause. Make people want to care, and make them realize they do care.

Understanding the psyches of consumers and potential consumers to spark viral marketing takes thorough market research, the ability to carve out a demographic and niche, and the willingness to try new things.

It’s that time of the year to review our successes and missteps in business – and what a humdinger of a year it was. While post-holiday slump sets in and everyone settles into 2009, take a few minutes and list your business resolutions – your own road map to a successful new year.

Ask yourself:

• Did my marketing plan get me where I wanted to be in 2008? Evaluate your tactical marketing plan for hits and misses. Use the hits as a jumping off point for creating a new, evolved 2009 plan. In a year where competition for consumers’ attention will be fiercer than ever, your plan should include new and updated creative to ensure you rise above the fray. Don’t back away from your goals of growth in a recession economy, but do take cautious measures to be sure your messaging is exactly on target – you can’t afford misses.

• What challenges are my clients going to meet? Few industries are immune to today’s economic struggle. Anticipate what your customers are going to find most valuable from you and focus on building that aspect of your business. It’s a perfect time to introduce new timely and relevant offers on your web site.

• Where can I trim my budget and where should I maintain? It’s more important that ever to win and keep your clients’ trust. You don’t have to undergo an entire redesign of your web presence to reassure your consumers that your business is healthy and thriving. The simple addition of personalized communications, such as a weekly blog, gives you a vehicle to speak directly and with authority to your target market about topics that have immediate impact in their organizations. Likewise, a Virtual Spokesperson — full-motion video representative whom you designate to deliver a spoken message — adds a personal touch without demanding a complete site overhaul.

Trends in online business, Internet marketing and email marketing are constantly shifting. Stay alert to the latest and you’ll be keyed in on how the competition is spending their marketing dollars. Those businesses that maintain their integrity and poise will emerge as leaders in 2009.

No doubt, it’s a lot easier to create an online business than it is to build a bricks-and-mortar storefront. No building inspections, remodels, fixtures, signage or utility bills with your web biz. No months of planning and waiting and budgeting. You can hatch an idea one Friday night and be in business by Monday morning on the web!

Let’s look a little closer at this. What do these steps in real-life business building do for your operation?

Building Inspections
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your architecture is sound, safe and reliable, and meets the highest standards.
Web:  Your web site is coded correctly to ensure reliability, up-to-date techniques, and online security standards are met for payment gateways.

Remodels
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your storefront is lively, interesting and current to attract customers who want to shop somewhere that understands their “vibe.”
Web: Your online business is attractive, well-written, always fresh, and cleanly designed; clients and visitors feel confident that you know your stuff.

Fixtures
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your business space is uncluttered and organization makes it easy to find the product they need.
Web: You minimize gizmos and distractions; your website is easy to navigate.

Signage
Bricks-and-Mortar: Signage is quickly spotted, easy to read, and portrays a powerful message.
Web: Your site is coded and written—optimized—for search engines so potential customers find you with ease.

Utility Bills
Bricks-and-Mortar: You can’t avoid these, but you can make your building efficient and take advantage of the bonuses of being a “green” business.
Web: Reliability and service are critical to keeping your business running 24-7. Ensure you have the best hosting service available.

Careful planning, attention to details, and keeping your customers needs in mind are key to success!

When you walk into a retail business, whether you are grocery shopping, shoe shopping, or buying furniture, what’s the thing that will make you walk out declaring “I’m never going there again!”

How about being ignored? A successful business knows that it needs to make an effort to win over every single person who takes the time and effort to seek them out and pay a visit. Think of all the places you go where you expect to encounter a greeting within seconds of entering the door. Even Wal-Mart is blind to the fact you arrived to buy just a gallon of milk instead of an HDTV, and adds that extra touch of greeting you and helping you with a shopping cart.

Video Spokesperson is your door greeter and the small effort that can make your website memorable. Especially for a site that is promoting a service or product, a Video Spokesperson offers that touch of human interaction, delivered by a professional who inspires trust and expertise. Isn’t that who you want holding open your door to potential customers?

When placed to immediately launch upon arrival to your website, Video Spokesperson is a fixed advertisement that delivers your message to every single visitor, at a cost of fractions what you’ll pay for a traditional print ad or a web banner on someone else’s website. You can use a Video Spokesperson to talk about a recent recognition you’ve received, or inform about special pricing or deals.

A knowledgeable voice, a smile, a warm greeting – while the web is a medium that promotes anonymity, people still respond to the human touch.

E-mail marketing is a cost effective way to build your business leads and get prospective customers to your small business. Adhering to ethical standards and making sure you are not spamming by allowing potential customers to actively sign up for the e-mail marketing newsletter is important and necessary. The trick to increasing your subscribers is to make your newsletter sign-up prominent on your website. Do this by adding repetition. Make sure the subscribe feature can be found on various pages throughout your website. For example, you can place the feature on a prominent section of the site and make sure it is eye catching enough for user interface to guarantee the reader takes notice, and then reiterate it on the footer section of your site for added effect. Some websites even have pop-ups that automatically appear once a site loads but be careful with this tactic as people often find pop-ups to be aggressive or annoying.

Another way to increase your e-mail marketing list is by offering something of value. People will be more willing to join a list if they get something out of it that they feel benefits them. Offering contests, discounts, or even a link to a free e-book is a great way to give back to a potential customer by letting them know you appreciate them. In doing so, you also give the positive impression that you give valuable information that will help entice and bring trust to your subscribers. A great relationship builder all around.

Make your content interesting. Your goal is to garner and keep people’s interest so that they will stick around. Content is king. Provide good content and success will be inevitable. Many services offer great e-mail marketing software including Constant Contact, Aweber, Graphic Mail, etc. Decide what you want to focus on for your e-mail marketing campaign to get a better idea of which service will best work for you.

A friend recently gifted me an item that I mistakenly called “antique.” It’s properly termed “vintage,” and indeed, that one word makes all the difference. You can never be too up on what’s out. Antique is a relic; vintage – that’s hip. Tip #1: Clever marketers keep abreast of the language, the presentation style and minute-by-minute evolution of what – or who – is popular.

Recently, when reviewing a body of ads purchased by a client for “good will”, I was struck by the way the client’s business was slapped into these publications without apparent regard to appropriateness. “But we need to reach the locals, and be supportive of the community.” But you also are paying precious marketing dollars for your ad. Don’t consider it charity. Consider it marketing. Place an ad in the senior citizens’ activity newsletter if you must, but be cognizant of the reader. If you sell running shoes, don’t run an ad that says, “Hey, we sell sneakers in downtown Akron.” Say “10% off all phone orders and free gift shipping in December!” Tip #2: Don’t dismiss the potential of any audience. Adapt.

Just as the words, “But we need to have this in the left-hand navigation” are leaving my mouth, data is coming in that says, web visitors don’t really read the menus. They scan – this we’ve known for years now – and even more surprisingly, they click. And click, and click. That vital piece of information isn’t right there on the menu bar? Not to worry. The trend is to embed the most important information in links within the body text. This enable the search engines to scour the site, from link to link, more effectively cataloging the references of key words that your potential audience will type into a search engine. Tip #3: You can never know much about web marketing; be alert to the data.

We’ve all got one, had one, or encountered one: the next generation of world leaders, current household opinion leaders, and affluent spenders. You got it: the American teenager.

Who is this stranger and how can you get their attention? Teens today are more affluent than ever. Responsible parenting has given them access to cash – through their own savings and checking accounts meant to teach them fiscal responsibility. Teens are more technically savvy and discriminating than ever. They are not as brand loyal as they used to be. They care about the environment; they look for companies with social conscience.

The teen population is most likely to go online and research a company before making purchase. Teens are influential in their parents’ purchases, too. Your web site design, email marketing and web marketing campaigns should have teen appeal, even if your product is aimed at the head of household. Here are a couple tips:

• Be sure your web site is rich with key words that will be indexed, so when teens Google a product, your site will hit their radar. Think like a fourteen-year-old. What words would they use?
• Add a blog that speaks their language. If you are selling a product that a teen would want (clothing, jewelry, music, entertainment, for example) help them out with compelling reasons that will persuade their parents, too. Even better: hire a teen to blog for you.
• Teens are bombarded with email. Add an irresistible offer to your email marketing campaigns to grab their attention. Be sure to keep in touch with teens who have purchased before and keep making offers that will get them back.
• Personalize! Know your teen customers and what’s important to them. Let them customize their offers!
• Play up your social responsibility. Whatever you do to help the world, be sure you let your teen market know.

Be sure you know the fastest growing, most culturally diverse group of consumers in the United States. 

The main function of the web is to provide information and connections among human beings – what a perfect scenario for marketing! One of the best things about the web is how it serves as an incubator for new ideas and applications. Just as quickly as we become accustomed to applications for grabbing attention, like Twitter, a new service comes along to bolster the benefit and make it more effective. Blogs, like this one, and social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and so many more are loaded with conversations and feedback about everything you can imagine.

If you could only aggregate the comments by topic and get a look at today’s buzz on your favorite topic – say, your product. How valuable would that be?

You guessed it – someone already thought of that. Amidst the onslaught of marketing messages now flying in all directions, people are creating applications to sort out the stuff they actually care about. One such application is Backtype. This is a nifty, simple tool that allows you to track conversations through more than a dozen (yes, there are more than that!) applications including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Blogger and WordPress. Backtype is basically a search engine that crawls social media networks and offers a simple interface. Enter a search term, like “social media marketing” and you’ll see, in this case, over 500 comments, which you can filter by date to get the freshest perspective.

Another spinoff of the social media frenzy –- use it to understand your audience, your product appeal, and enhance your web site marketing strategy.

A colleague recently posted on Facebook that she was, sadly and after many years of devotion, no longer a loyal customer of a certain big box retailer. She was refused the right to return an item for even a store credit, for what was apparently a policy not even the store manager understood.

When you, a small business working to promote your online services, products or real-world storefront, hear a story like this, your wheels should be turning. You can compete with mega-stores because you have something they will never have: the ability to take care of each and every customer as a unique and important individual. You’ve got the opportunity every day to to market directly to your competition’s customers – but even more importantly, you have the chance to catch the golden moment a dissatisfied mega-store customer declares, “I’m NEVER shopping at there again!”

Here’s how you can swoop in and save the day:

- Extend a price matching offer. It doesn’t have to be on every item in your store. It can be on a certain product line, or for a limited period of time. It’s a lure you are dangling in front of a customer who is ready to bite out of sheer frustration.

- Publicize your niche. Go after the customer who wants that one special thing that you do SO much better than a big box retail chain. They’ll love your personalized attention. They just need to know you are there.

- Shout your success. Post your favorite customer stories that illustrate how choosing you over a mega-store made it a win-win.

- Blog, blog, blog. Write every week about your competitive advantage, share a story, talk up a new product, make a special offer to anyone who mentions the blog.

All those dissatisfied customers have been desensitized to what it means to be actually “served” in a retail establishment. Give them a wake up call. Let it be you that gets their attention.

Keeping in contact with your customers and servicing them beyond the initial sale is vital to the success of your company. After all it’s a steady customer base you’re hoping to achieve, not a revolving door. When most of a businesses resources and staff are focusing on increasing sales, existing customers get left in the dark, free to be sold to the competition.

Finding ways to keep in touch with your customers can be timely and costly depending on how you plan your “customer retention” strategy. You could hire staff to service and update clients on new products and services, which can be very expensive, or, you could try Email Marketing.

Email Marketing is a persmission-based tool that is very effective in helping businesses stay in touch with their clients via email. With an interesting newsletter type design, businesses can let customers know about special offers, upcoming deadlines for orders, special events, customer recognition, notes from their sales representative and more. It can essentially be used as your electronic newsletter.

Although this method of customer retention is favored because of ease of use and low cost, it does need maintenance. For instance, while Email Marketing provides the features needed to help the user comply with the latest spam laws, businesses will need to update their customer’s email list. This isn’t a draw back for most businesses, however those who aren’t computer savvy can learn the simple steps to setting up their customer’s list.
This can also be a great tool for prospective clients. Send it to them once and if they become a customer, keep them on the list, otherwise remove them to avoid violating spam laws.

This marketing tool is also attractive to small business owners because it can be set up easily. Customers can be added individually or imported in bulk from an external file, and customer lists can be segmented into interest groups and detailed demographic information to enable more granular targeting of business news.