Viral Marketing for the Small Business

Although I am not entirely qualified to talk about Viral Marketing, what I can do is talk about how I, a Marketing Manager, for a small business in the UK has used viral marketing as part of my marketing plan. The progress we have made on viral marketing has culminated in the game, Snowballs to Christmas (http://www.mapsinternational.co.uk/snowballs)

We’ve been looking at developing a viral marketing campaign for the past year, without any suitable inkling as to what to do. Being a small mapping company we don’t have the most exciting of subject matter to enable us to release new innovative material and we have struggled to come up with something that we felt confident enough to release. This Christmas we decided it was time to do something viral, and felt that it wasn’t necessary entirely important to have something related to mapping. If we take the Office Max Elf Yourself viral marketing campaign as an example, it’s clearly obvious that if a game is done well then it doesn’t need to be directly related.

The main requirements we had in mind for a viral game were the following:
• It had to be related to Christmas
• It had to be fun and make people want to play it again
• It shouldn’t be a negative game
• It should be related to the core ethos of http://www.mapsinternaitonal.co.uk

The viral game we came up with was “Snowballs to Christmas”, have a look at the site to see how it fits in with our core strategy (http://www.mapsinternational.co.uk/snowballs). We built this viral game using in-house flash developers, which I admit is a luxury most small business won’t have. However there are lots of companies out that will take the task of developing the viral game for you, or for those on a small budget, you can buy games from companies (i.e. http://www.galaxygraphics.co.uk) and brand it up for your business. We estimated that the Snowballs to Christmas game cost around £500 to create, which is about the cost of a small advert in a trade magazine.

“Snowballs to Christmas” is a fun viral flash game where the player gets to throw snowballs at Santa and his Elves to relieve Christmas stress. The hook in is that we offer a stress free shopping experience, the tag line being: Fed up with queues? Can’t find that elusive gift? Watching the pennies this Christmas? Use our gift finder at mapsinternational.co.uk and get free delivery direct to your door. Although you need to remember that a piece of viral marketing isn’t going to bring in loads of sales, it’s important to ensure that it isn’t a million miles away from what you try to promote within your business.

Our strategy for promoting the game was as follows:
• Send the viral marketing game to all the office and ask each person to forward on to all their friends and family, hopefully starting the virus process
• Promote on social networking sites, including Facebook, Bebo, Youtube etc
• Promote on groups, forums, blogs relevant to the game
• Bookmark in sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon, De.li.ci.ous etc, ask everyone we know to do the same
• Submit to games sites (more about this here http://mochiland.com/articles/marketing-flash-games-the-other-half-of-the-battle)

Mapsinternational.co.uk is part of a larger company Lovell Johns (http://www.lovelljohns.com) with the benefit of having a range of developer skills which helped us develop the game. The viral game has only just launched so I can’t as yet tell the benefits, but within 24 hours, the web links are stacking up, the posts on blogs and forums are happening all the time, and the clicks are increasing. The main thing that I’ve come away with is that you shouldn’t look to viral marketing for a quick way to push orders through to your business. Viral marketing campaigns are so much more than that, they allow you to develop brand awareness, increase your rankings in the Search Engines through link building and traffic. All it needs is a bit of imaginative thought and a mega push from your marketing team once it is released onto the web.

Watch this space for further viral marketing campaigns from http://www.mapsinternational.co.uk

Liz Adams
Marketing Manager
Lovell Johns / mapsinternational.co.uk
T: 01993 883 161
E:liz.adams@mapsinternational.co.uk
W: http://www.mapsinternational.co.uk
W: http://www.lovelljohns.com



Liz Adams is Marketing Manager for Lovell Johns online map shop Mapsinternational.co.uk. Mapsinternational.co.uk is the largest online resource for maps and guides. Its comprehensive range of around 40,000 products includes business mapping products and services, wall maps, travel maps and guides, gifts, activity maps and guides, educational products and much more.
Mapsinternational.co.uk is a trading name of Lovell Johns Ltd, a leading cartographic and mapping solutions company.

Stocking Fillers

This week grab those stocking fillers. We have another three great products now on sale.

Small political Wall Map - 20% off

All Berlitz Travel Guides - 10% off

Pack of 2 Wolrd Desk Maps - 10% off


Offers end 2nd dec 2008