Businesses don't have an unlimited budget to spend on marketing. Entrepreneurs and business owners can turn to viral and alternative marketing to get the word out without investing in traditional advertising. Join2grow.biz takes a look at the latest trends.
Viral marketing and viral advertising
The term ‘viral’ refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness. Viral strategies achieve their marketing objectives (such as product sales) through a variety of self-replicating processes, analogous to the spread of computer viruses. Viral marketing facilitates and encourages people to share your marketing message with their friends, by passing along promotions in the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, images, or even SMS messages.
Online Advertising
Advertising budgets are continuing to shift to the internet and will continue to do so as new opportunities such as video open up. Online ad spending increases have been driven by the growing ability to measure campaigns effectively and a relatively high ROI, or return on investment. As a result, for many businesses, the question isn't whether to advertise online or even where or when, but rather how to stretch every Euro spent.
For the entrepreneur and guerrilla marketer, this translates into a focused pay-per-click campaign on Google AdWords, Yahoo or MSN search tools. You can focus on a particular target market searching particular keywords and test your campaign instantly, all for fewer Euros than the old mass-market banner ads and certainly for a lot less than the cost of print, radio or television ads.