As seen with break-out companies like YouTube, viral marketing can be incredibly powerful. Basically, your customers/users are taking the time to share your products. What could be better?
In fact, one of my favorite viral campaigns was the business card giveaway from VistaPrint (Nasdaq: VPRT).
To get some background on it, I interviewed Trynka Shineman, who is the senior vice president of North American marketing at VistaPrint:
“VistaPrint’s free business cards are so successful for several reasons. First, the small business market was so vastly underserved by local printers who charge hundreds of dollars for business cards, that there was a tremendous need. VistaPrint was able to make a big splash in the market by not only providing the best value in the market – but by actually giving away the business cards. For a market that had been so vastly underserved, ‘free’ was a bold statement that drove adoption and trial.
“Second, the business card offer is targeted specifically to attract the small office home office customer, VistaPrint’s target audience. Not only are business cards something universally needed by this audience (and typically one of the first products they buy when starting a business), but also they are an expression of the business’ brand identity which can be leveraged to cross-sell matching business identity and marketing products.
“Finally, the line on the back of all the free business cards states, ‘Business cards are FREE at www.vistaprint.com!’ With 250 impressions of that line in every free business card order, it was and is still a fantastic viral marketing tool for the business.
“In fact, our free business cards were so successful, we now offer other free products including one free t-shirt, one free pen, 100 free postcards, 25 free brochures, etc. By giving away our products people get to see for themselves the high-quality products they can receive from VistaPrint with no risk.”
Filed under: Marketing | Tagged: Viral Marketing, VistaPrint
