How to stretch your advertising budget: By adding a viral component to every campaign
Assessing today’s media landscape
It’s perfectly okay to still love traditional media in this day and age. Sure, there are a million non-traditional routes for your next ad campaign to take, but maybe print, radio and TV have always proved their worth to you in the past. No reason to change a good thing, right? Or maybe you’re a little gun-shy about trying all these new ideas, uncomfortable with the unknown outcome they may offer. Maybe.Thankfully, you don’t have to jump all the way into this experiment. But you absolutely have to dip your toe into the water on your next campaign. Because if done right, you’ll add a big boost to the exposure for your brand through a viral advertising component.
The world is ready and waiting
Great ideas get passed around and talked about online – funny ideas, smart ideas, unique ideas, new ideas, wild ideas – and if your advertising is one of those ideas, it’ll get passed around and talked about too.Here’s the trick to tapping into this free PR phenomenon. The people who pass around those ideas aren’t waiting to forward your entire ad campaign to their personal network or feature every, single ad on their blogs for readers to check out. They’re waiting anxiously for a fresh, unique, singular execution that makes them think, “This is something other people should see.”
What’s great about this is that the bulk of your campaign can still bank on traditional media to carry your brand message to the masses – allowing you to risk little and stay within your media “comfort zone.” However, with the addition of a simple viral component, you’ll generate talk-value far beyond what your traditional media campaign may breed.
What’s the viral trick?
Because viral advertising tactics have become so valued and, therefore, so overused, a big key to success in developing your viral idea is to ensure it is on-brand and a logical extension of your campaign. Viral for viral’s sake simply won’t do.Some of the options to consider as you begin this endeavor might be an online game to drive website traffic and interaction with your brand, a guerrilla stunt that is filmed and made available for pass-around via YouTube, or a “too hot for TV” extended-length commercial that can only be viewed online.
To ensure it goes viral, you should contact leading websites and blogs that cover great advertising with info on the campaign when it is completed, as well as sites that concentrate on reporting on your specific industry. Once it’s posted on their sites or on your own blog, you can submit links to those posts to social bookmarking sites that include Digg, Stumbleupon, Redit, Del.icio.us and others where your viral advertising will take on a life of its own as readers vote on its popularity and talk-value.
