Often when I hear about a new business starting off I hear that they have a word-of-mouth strategy.  Of course that is a good strategy if it works because it’s free and the customers are always familiar with your business before any work begins.  Unfortunately, how long can you run a business on the word of mouth?  Well if you are fortunate enough, you can run it for a long time.  What it requires is a little viral marketing online to reach every potential customer that you can.

Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive flash games,  ebooks, free software, images, or even text messages.  The most basic forms of viral marketing isn’t infinitely successful but it can give you a great start to supplement other products or introduce new products.  One example of viral marketing is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  While Internet Explorer doesn’t provide much revenue for Microsoft it supplements other core products like Microsoft Office and increases brand awareness.

Now Viral marketing can take virtually any form, the goal is to offer something that is free and is of limited cost to you.  Using marketing strategies such as providing easy “Link to Friend” and “Share this Page” links will help your marketing campaign go viral and increase brand attention to your product or service.

You are probably asking how viral marketing can help a small business?  Well that is an a question that can be answered in millions of ways.  First off, viral marketing is usually cheap and easy to create.  If you are a local home improvement company, you can upload instructional videos to youtube to increase awareness of your company and let potential customers know about your skills.  If you are a small grocery store in a community, you can have a “Share this Page” with a friend or even recipes on your website that customers can easily link to one another.

Viral marketing is supposed to be a simple and catchy item that can easily be distributed amongst the masses.  Make sure that you provide an easy way to spread the link either by creating a digg.com submission or a “link to friend” form.  The small cost of viral marketing should pay of once your campaign goes viral.  Just remember that like word of mouth marketing or advertising, the communication chains have their limits as well.