Have you noticed how more and more Internet videos are finding their way onto prime time television news shows? It is nearly impossible to watch the nightly news without seeing such a video.

These are called “viral videos” and usually they arrive on national TV because they were interesting enough to be passed around on the Internet. Several top websites carry and rank these videos daily based on viewer popularity. YouTube is one of them.

Viral videos can also be a force in marketing. Consider the Arm Blanket, a simple product consisting of a blanket with two sleeves. The owner puts their arms in the sleeves and “wears” the blanket.

After only a few months in existence, the inventor of this product realized millions of dollars in sales, and this popularity was largely due to viral videos that showed people “wearing” the blanket in different venues.

Before the advent of the Internet and viral videos, to launch such a product might have been very costly and so difficult that it may have failed. But many videos made by the owners of the blanket were passed around on the Internet and served to fuel the remarkable sales of these products. Companies exist that can help you use this new exciting form of marketing.

How is this different than traditional TV advertising?

First of all, distributing the video is free, and that is a very big difference. Second, if you are able to produce a catchy video about your product or service that goes viral on the Internet, you can end up with priceless exposure that translates to millions of dollars in profit.

This is not possible with traditional broadcasting means where every minute is sold at a high price.

This “democratization” of advertising is a relatively new phenomenon and appeared with the advent of the Internet, and possibly will not be available in the future.

Certainly, the large network broadcasters are pounding their heads against the wall trying to figure out how to take control of it and harness it. Until they figure out a way to do this you can—and should—take advantage of this marketing method.

www.andrelarabie.com

andre@andrelarabie.com

Social media refers to websites that allow people to congregate, interact, and communicate digitally using the Internet and web browser programs.

Social media sites include places such as MySpace, Facebook, and others, websites that have been specifically designed for members with a common interest. Social media sites are broadly defined, and this term can also include other, more simple (and subtle) places for people to communicate or collaborate.

A store website such as walmart.com can be viewed as a social media with limited membership abilities. Although members can do only a small fraction of communicating and collaborating, nonetheless, it can be important from a marketing perspective.

For example, Wal-Mart customers can leave feedback about products and experiences they have had with those products. Although this is a limited amount of communication, it is something that affects the marketing equation. Specifically, when a customer leaves a rating on a product, others will see this rating and it will thus affect prospective buyer decision-making.

Each product might have an average “customer rating,” which is a number between 1 and 5, and an area for owners of the item to leave comments.

Believe it or not, there are companies that provide the service of visiting such sites and entering positive comments about products. You can hire one of these companies and pay them per entry to visit product review websites and enter positive information about your product or service. Although this might seem like some type of fraud, it is so new that laws are not in place to regulate it and it is likely that your competitors are possibly doing it.

In fact, the same companies that enter positive information about your products will also enter negative information about your competitor’s products and services.

In any case, you should analyze your particular business and see if it can accommodate a social media site.

It is truly a brave new world. This is only one area of the Internet that affects marketing like never before in the history of business. Note that social media is broad enough to be the subject of an entire book, and for a more detailed treatment, you should search out those books.

www.andrelarabie.com

andre@andrelarabie.com

A blog is similar in function to a forum (or to a lesser degree, a marketing List), but it is less interactive for the visitors. While visitors can comment on the blog posts, they cannot make posts themselves. In a forum, the visitors can post and comment equally. They are free to create a new discussion topic and then interact with other forum members who may comment on the topic.

In a blog the functionality is more one-sided since the visitors cannot create the postings and this function is reserved for the moderator of the blog. The moderator is tasked with adding posts and managing the comments to those posts. Although the rules vary somewhat between different blogs, this is the general functionality of a blog.

To use blogging in your marketing efforts, you should create a blog and moderate it by adding interesting postings. Once you create the blog, you will be responsible for approving or disapproving the comments.

If you use search engine optimized content, you will find that your postings get hits in the search engines and you get more visitors to your blog, and to your main site if you have links from the blog content to the site. You can also direct the search engines to spider your blog after each entry is posted and your blog content will get hits immediately.

Besides generating additional Internet traffic with the content of the postings, you can also “visit” (manually or with the help of various software programs) other blogs that discuss related subjects and you can post comments in those blogs, making sure to include a backlink from your comment to your money website (your order page or landing page main business page). When someone reads the blog entry or comment and clicks on the link to your page, they are following a backlink to your site.

There are several savvy marketing companies that can assist you with this process and help you get started. You can search Google to identify and compare their services.

www.andrelarabie.com

andre@andrelarabie.com

If you do not have a tagline and you do not really know what separates you from your competition, yet you have been in business for a while and are doing well, then it is likely that a tagline does exist underneath all of it, and you only need to discover what it is! To do so, you can spend some time looking around and asking questions.

First of all, you can look closely at what your business is doing and how it is different than your competitors.

What is your most popular product or service?

How are you offering it differently to your customers?

What makes you different?

If you work at these questions for a while, but still you cannot get answers that allow you to identify the unique features of your business, don’t despair; ask your customers.

Ask them what it is that keeps them coming back or what it is that brought them to you in the first place. They will likely point out some unique features of your products and or services that you can use in your marketing efforts.

Also ask the people who work for you what they like about your company. They will also be able to provide insight because when a company has something good going for it, usually that feature is also attractive to employees; they want to be associated with the company and work there because of those same features that are attracting the customers.

When you find these unique elements of your business, you are exposing and identifying the niche that you operate in. Understanding and leveraging your niche will allow you to further dominate your competition. You can take it to the next level. This understanding will then help guide you to establishing an effective tagline.

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andre@andrelarabie.com

Before developing a marketing strategy for your business, it helps to consider several things with respect to the customer mindset. Here are some ideas related to this subject.

First of all, what types of things go through a customer’s mind during the process of purchasing a particular product?

- Is this the product that will meet my needs?
- How much does it cost?
- How do I pay for the product?
- Is this the best value I can obtain for my money?
- What if I need to return this product, for whatever reason?
- What advantage do I get by purchasing this product from a particular vendor?
- What is the customer service and support behind this product?

These are all questions that your marketing program should address, both implicitly and explicitly. If a customer asks you why he or she should buy from you, think deeply before you answer. Don’t respond by saying, “We have the best price, the best products, and the best service.”

Everyone says this, so you should be different or you risk blending in with your competitive background. You need to offer something unique or you risk getting lumped in with everyone else.

To answer the question with a compelling, non-standard answer, you should think long and hard about what makes you different and what niche you are in.

These will form the keystones of your marketing programs, and you should create a succinct slogan that embodies the things that differentiate you from your competitors, those added value advantages are what make you a unique and valuable choice for your customers.

After you have distilled those elements of your business into several sentences or paragraphs, compress it into a short phrase or tagline.

Here are some examples of popular business taglines:

AT&T – “Reach out and touch someone”
American Express – “Don’t leave home without it”
Charmin – “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”
Fox News – “Fair and balanced, we report, you decide”
Kellogg’s Rice Krispies – “Snap, Crackle, Pop”
M&Ms – “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands”
Memorex – “Is it live or is it Memorex?”
Miller Lite – “Tastes great, less filling”
Nissan – “Enjoy the ride”
Panasonic – “Slightly ahead of its time”
Paul Masson – “We will sell no wine before its time”
Rolaids – “How do you spell relief? R-O-L-A-I-D-S”
Taco Bell – “Think outside the bun”
Target – “Expect more. Pay less”
United Airlines – “Fly the friendly skies”
US Marines – “The few, the proud, the Marines”
V-8 – “I coulda had a V-8!”
VISA – “It’s everywhere you want to be”
Wal-Mart – “Always low prices”
Yellow Pages – “Let your fingers do the walking”

Note that as you read each tagline, an image comes to mind that conveys something unique about the company; at least in the better taglines, this is the case. For example, “Always low prices” emphasizes economy, the Wal-Mart image. “Tastes great, less filling” makes you believe that this beer will do something difficult to accomplish—not leave you feeling bloated after drinking a few beers. “Slightly ahead of its time” implies great technology with Panasonic, the cutting edge.

All of these companies have taken the time to think long and hard about the differentiating elements of their business, those things that make their product, service, and company uniquely different than the competition’s offering.

You can also do this with your business, and if you find it difficult to do, then in fact, I contend that you need to redesign elements of your business so that you are unique. Doing so will give you a competitive advantage and a foundation for a popular and successful marketing campaign.

www.andrelarabie.com

andre@andrelarabie.com