If you’re new to online marketing, you may have blinked at the title of this article.
Marketing is a profession, right? And people generally expect to be paid for their work, right? So how are you going to get people to do your marketing for you unless you have the kind of budget that, say, Old Spice does?
The answer is easy. And while I’m going to use Old Spice as an example, you only need to have a bare fraction of their budget to make it work.
The way you get people to do your online marketing for you is to give them something of value. What you need to know for the purposes of this article is that experiential marketing is the tool that makes people want to market for you.
How?
Again, you give them something of value. Maybe you provide them with useful information that features your product. Or you give them step-by-step instructions for dong something that falls in your range of expertise.
Now, what do people do when they find something useful? We all like to help out our friends, right? Give people useful information, and they’ll pass it along to their friends. Now that they’re able to do that online, the audiences they’re reaching make traditional word-of-mouth marketing look like a dry trickle compared to a rain storm.
What does Old Spice have to do with experiential marketing? When you get some time later today, I want you to do an online search for “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” Then I dare you to not send that ad to 10 of your friends.
Why? Because it’s hilarious. Old Spice has taken the power of online videos and produced a series of commercials that basically make fun of every one of their commercials you saw on TV in the 70s and 80s. The result has been hundreds of thousands of page views.
I can tell you right now that probably 90% of those page views happened because people sent the link for those ads to their friends. In other words, all Old Spice had to do was shoot the ads and then let other people do the online marketing for them.
Another good series of online videos is the “Will It Blend?” series put out by Blendtec. Take a geeky-looking elderly man in a lab coat and goggles, take the item of your choice, and put it in a blender.
The result? A marketing phenomenon with millions of pageviews. Just recently, Blendtec did an online video where they blended an iPad. Yes. An iPad.
You can bet that video is going to be making the rounds as people pass it along online.
These ads encourage people to, in effect, do online marketing because they make them laugh. Or, in my earlier examples, because they give solid information the people need.
The days of marketing to a captive audience are long gone. Today, you have to give people something of value as a reward for their paying attention to your marketing. But the other side of that coin is that, if you do it well enough, you can get thousands or even millions of people to do your online marketing for you.
