You would say that printing business cards is such a low end comodity that it’s very hard and maybe useless to promote this type of services “the big way”. I mean…I think there is a company providing these kind of services every mile in my town. So how can you diferenciate and use innovative promotion techniques to drive attention (and customers) to your shop? Viral Marketing.
Wikipedia says:”Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. ” So basically is about spreading news like fire!
How can you do “viral marketing” to increase the awareness over your business cards service? Here is an example: I’ve got contacted by Eric Windsor from www.younggogetter.com that announced there is a nice contest going on: I could win:
* 5,000 double-sided, full-colour, UV coated, glorious business cards printed by Orange32 (the coolest printer out there). ($150 value)
* The creative services of mois (Travis) to help you design, layout, and make sure your business cards are press ready. ($200 value)
* Free shipping to anywhere in the world. This is open to everyone, not just in North America.
* A free text ad for a month in the YGG sidebar under Featured Sites. ($50 value)
if I just write something that is “the most interesting, unique, helpful, insightful, or strange post, and award that one person the prize.”. (you can enter this contest as well until October 19th 2007 if you have a blog). The prize is offered by Orange 32, a “creative solutions & print company” based on New York.
Now I can bet this is going to draw some attention! Attracting bloggers in competitions and ultimatelly make viral marketing based on blogs it’s probably one of the most effective cost efficient way to promote a business.
While I’m sure my article is not “interesting, unique, helpful, insightful, or strange” and it won’t get me the big prize, talking about business cards it’s a good subject for the Small Business Entrepreneur blog.
I believe that most of my readers are entrepreneurs wannabes or bootrapped entrepreneurs that look forward to get the best value for their first investments! And I bet, one of the first thing they are going to spend their money on are business cards. I also bet, they are reading small business and entrepreneurship blogs right now!
So what better marketing viral technique can you come up with than attracting bloggers into it?
Attracting bloggers is great. I’ve had less success with such than I’d like (though perhaps I just haven’t put enough $$ behind it).
Best of luck with the contest.
Er, meant to say–one thing I’m hoping to do is a series of flash games that tie in with GUD Magazine. Hopefully that will pull in some related demographics… and get folks talking about things they’re more used to talking about.
viral marketing is the best but you have to think of a great idea that goes viral-.~