The Aha Factor

Most marketing approaches that support Internet companies focus on good online strategies like e-mail, banner ads, and mailing lists. But there is another piece to the puzzle that many net-preneurs overlook: offline marketing. Aren't offline marketing efforts too expensive for your business? After all, direct mail campaigns and paid advertisements are pretty pricey. But they're not your only option. Viral marketing techniques are getting a lot of buzz both online and offline -- because they work. When someone sees a service or product they like, they tell their friends. The neat net trick is making that easy to do with technology. John Chang, president of seeUthere.com, has a vested interest in getting that trick right. His company manages event promotions from the invitations to the follow-up, a process that requires a deft hand to combine offline marketing with online technology. "It's kind of ironic," he says. "Everybody talks about how online presence is everything and will completely change the world. Yet if you look at Internet companies, certainly ours, you still have to depend on traditional marketing means like direct marketing, seminars, trade shows and so forth. How can you make those traditional marketing efforts easier? Read on and see!

Win Customers with Viral Marketing, Not Ads

To pay for big ad coverage, you have to spend big bucks. If you don't have that kind of cash to flash, you can still have an effect. "Some Internet companies are blowing $10M, $20M in a single quarter," Chang says. "It's very, very hard to rise above that noise and be heard unless you spend a comparable amount of money. So we decided not to do that." Instead, seeUthere relies heavily on viral marketing. "If we can get an organization that has a thousand members or more and have them send out invitations, we're now touching a tremendous amount of people. Those people will then touch more people and that kicks off the whole viral marketing process," Chang says. seeUthere has a built-in opportunity to touch off viral marketing - the invites they send to the thousands of people invited to events all over the world. You'll have to find the viral trigger for your own company. Once you do that, you simply create technology that enables the virus to spread. "With traditional offline marketing campaigns," Chang says, "even if you bought a product or got an advertisement you really liked, it's a pain to have to tell your friends. You'd have to proactively pick up a phone or remember to hand them something. But the power of the Internet is that when you see something you like, it's easy to immediately forward it to someone else."

Pick Your Partners Well

Signing on business partners can complement your service offering, true. But your partners can also bring with them a built-in audience, which may migrate to your company. "We depend a lot on partners like ONElist to give us appropriate traffic," Chang says. "If you happen to be on a list server talking to other people with the same interest and you all want to get together for a discussion group, then it's very natural for you to be sent over to seeUthere and use our system." The community members using ONElist for their listserv might use seeUthere if there's an easy one click button to do so, obviously placed. If they do click and stay, seeUthere has just effectively harnessed ONElist's already built audience. seeUthere makes it easy with a "Tell a Friend" button that automatically sends info about the service to associates. "We spend a lot of time looking at the system, trying to figure out how to make it really easy, how to give people the "Aha factor" so they want to tell their friends about our site," Chang says. Every company has to formulate a different viral strategy. Yours may look very different from seeUthere's, but you should have one. Tell-a- friend marketing is one of the cheapest ways to make an impact on the market - and one of the most effective. Think about how your business can enable that customer to start talking, and you're on your way.