Viral Marketing
This is a very powerful viral marketing or automatic word of mouth technique that is used by very few.
It’s exceptionally powerful when executed on the Internet as you shall see in a while.
To describe it, I’ll need to show you an off-line example.
My son turned 30 days old about 4 1/2 months ago. He was born on Christmas Day last year.
Here’s a really cute photo of him sitting up (at 3 1/2 months) next to me as I was working on my computer, wondering what I was doing snapping his photo:
A bewildered Zi-Yang
In case you’re wondering – no, a baby at 3 1/2 months old usually cannot sit up on his own without support. My baby got all the support he needed from that special chair (which my wife and I had set our eyes on long before he was born) he was sitting on that enabled him to sit upright without falling to his sides or forward.
Incidentally, I’m a father for the very first time, having finally settled down after many years “in the wilderness” (yeah, according to Mom). It’s a truly exciting and fulfilling experience, one that I never thought I would cherish to this extent.
Not only that, I finally got to lose some of the weight I’ve always wanted to lose for many years playing football and other sports and going to the gym regularly, but couldn’t for some reason. I strongly suspect that that giant mug of delicious banana smoothie after every session was the problem as it probably contained more calories than I had burned off doing incredibly boring exercises (like working the treadmill and stationary bikes while watching MTV videos) to bring back the six-pack I used to have.
And I lost the weight by simply spending some time taking care of him together with my wife, every single day. Yes, this includes diaper changes, bathing him, feeding him, carrying him, walking him, playing with him and using him for some serious weightlifting exercises. Total weight lost so far – about 9 pounds!
Now that’s not really a lot, but for somebody who is not really overweight in the first place (I just needed a little “tune-up”), it’s quite something.
With my Pajamas lifestyle, taking care of him for hours at a time isn’t really a problem. It truly is a very enriching experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else, including hiring a baby sitter to do the “job” for us instead.
Anyway, being 30 days old is a milestone for a newborn Chinese baby. We call it the “Full Moon” event.
Now I could either hold a dinner for close friends and relatives to celebrate the occasion, or I could distribute cakes, desserts and other food items to them instead.
However, because he had picked up a urinary tract infection when he was just a few days old, our pediatrician recommended that he did not come into contact with too many people since his immune system was still immature and he could pick up further infections as a result.
So my wife and I decided to cancel the dinner celebration (where he would definitely be passed around from person to person to look at), and go for the second option.
Now instead of preparing the food items ourselves, we decided to buy pre-packaged “Full Moon” gift packs available at cake shops so that we could save a lot of time and effort in not having to do things on our own.
I searched and searched for those packs around where I live but didn’t quite like what I saw from the few that were available.
Either they didn’t provide the food items that I wanted, or their packaging left a lot to be desired.
Packaging is important if you want to leave a good impression on your recipients.
So I did a search on Google for other providers.
I found one that was not a cake shop but a restaurant. Its specializes in serving Nyonya food, which is a delightful gastronomic creation found nowhere else in the world.
The menu looked good, the packaging was professional enough, and the price was reasonable too.
So I went to order 100 of their Full-Moon gift packs and saw an awesome Pajamas Marketing technique in action.
Here’s how the gift pack looked like:
While it isn’t one of the best designs you’ll ever see for a gift pack, it’s a whole lot better than some of the others I’ve seen.
Now the top cover of the box showed the restaurant’s name. The names of the newborn and his parents were printed on stickers and stuck on the cover for some personal touch.
Inside the box would be the food items consisting of a small portion of rice, curry, red eggs, deserts and others, depending on the package that you want. They have about 6 pre-packaged boxes to cater to various sizes of your recipients’ families.
Here’s a pack for two people:
Printed on the side of the box was the map leading to the restaurant:
Now everything looked good enough, and the food tasted good as well – so I didn’t mind all of that.
After all, it was in my interest for me to get the packages from a good restaurant so that the recipients of those packages would get a good impression of the gift that I would give them to commemorate my son’s 30th day on earth.
Now for the next day or two, I would go around distributing these nice boxes to my closest relatives and friends (with some help from my immediate family).
And here’s the irony:
I paid for those packages at the full price quoted by them.
And I’ve incurred some costs and expenses in travelling to find 100 families to give the packages to.
This means that I was PAYING the restaurant what they were asking for, to distribute SAMPLES of their food for them at MY OWN cost, to 100 of MY own contacts!
And EACH and EVERY ONE of my contacts were potential customers of that restaurant!
Because everybody dines out once in a while, right?
And if any of them were to be impressed with the food found in the gift pack, and went to the restaurant to check it out – I wouldn’t be paid a single cent for the referral!
And yes, I didn’t mind it one bit.
I didn’t mind it because the restaurant’s Full Moon packs saved me time, tasted good, were reasonably priced and enabled me to make a good impression in lieu of the dinner celebration.
Now here’s something that’s even sweeter:
The restaurant in this example was already selling those same food items every single day.
Their staff were already being paid a salary, and it would cost the restaurant nothing extra to get them to work a little bit more packing their gift pack orders.
Therefore it required just a little bit more effort and money on their part to print special boxes to hold those food items for the important Full Moon celebration that runs THROUGHOUT the year.
This is the case because the occasion takes place 30 days from a newborn’s delivery date.
So…hello?
Chinese babies are born every single DAY!
And if you know how many Chinese there are in this world, your sneaky little marketing heart may just skip a few beats!
(Answer: 1.3 billion in China alone, with 300 million more scattered elsewhere on the planet.)
Thus the restaurant could potentially have someone coming into its premises EVERY SINGLE DAY to order their packs for their babies born about 30 days before!
With all of them paying the restaurant to advertise for them to the customers’ own contacts – which could number in the thousands every single month!
Yes, the restaurant could potentially have this happen, IF it markets its Full Moon gift packs well.
In fact, it could focus ALL its marketing efforts on the Full Moon packs only, to fill up its seats every day from the referrals those packs would bring it, instead of trying to advertise its restaurant the usual way, competing with a zillion other restaurants in its area all doing the same thing!
So if you’re a restaurant, you may want to look for an occasion like the “Full Moon” gift pack example above to fill up your restaurant instead, in classic Pajamas marketing fashion.
Now how many other arrangements can you think of that benefits a business this way?
Can you find an Internet Business that is making use of this very marketing tactic I’ve just talked about?
Click on this How To Start An Internet Business link for just 1 online example. Read what is being offered there, and then scroll all the way down and click on the “Buy Access Now Via Secure Server” link.
You’ll come to the sign-up page. Then scroll all the way down and look at the image just below the next “Buy Access Now Via Secure Server” link. That image starts with the word, “Payments…”. What does the entire sentence say?
Notice how that web site is paying the other business found in the image mentioned to use its services and in the process market that business for them, even as the web site’s customers are signing up only for the web site’s offer (for now).
The other businesses marketed this way can grow very quickly because they’re riding on their customers’ own natural marketing efforts for their webs sites which do not focus on those other businesses at all.
However, you can be sure the web site’s customers will NOTICE the other businesses because of how things are naturally set up, even if they’re not buying from the other businesses at that point in time.
The web site in this example WANT the other businesses’ names to be seen for the additional value those businesses’ names can bring to the web site’s own businesses. The other businesses can bring additional values like integrity, credibility and efficiency, for example, that can strengthen or enchance or corroborate whatever values the web site already has.
However, note that not all businesses can be marketed this way because certain conditions need to be present as seen above.
But now that you know what those conditions are, you can simply think in reverse to take advantage of the leverage you will get from this awesome marketing technique.
You do this by first figuring out who your customers are and how YOUR BUSINESS can be THE LINK between your customers and their contacts by giving your customers a product or service that they want to provide their contacts with, and with your business’s name mentioned - and then creating that business from scratch.
In case you’re thinking that the above online example is a unique case, I can assure you that it’s not.
Because another online business that can been marketed this way is paid 3rd party Autoresponder Systems. Yet another is paid 3rd party Ad Tracking Systems. And yet another is paid 3rd party Blog sites where you can set up your own Blog quickly and easily without any technical knowledge – a good example would be MovableType.
In the first 2 cases, their URL provides them with the exposure. In the last example (Blog sites), the Blog pages themselves will also market their services with the statement, “Powered By MovableType” somewhere on those pages.
And I’ve already created another completely different business based on this marketing technique with some powerful twists, to be launched soon.
However, only selected Prospects will get to see it because it’s not for everyone – but those few selected Prospects who become Customers are all I need to get the viral ball rolling at the speed of light (well, almost).
Not only that:
Those Customers will not only not mind marketing my product/service, they’ll be absolutely delighted to do so because of the said powerful twists I’ve already put into place. (And no, it’s not necessarily an Affiliate Program. In fact, I’ve haven’t seen anything else like it yet.)
The above concept isn’t quite the huge online “American Idol“ concept I spoke about in my last post, although some elements are present.
Stay tuned for more mind-busting stuff you won’t find anywhere else. But then you already knew that. 
Warm Regards,
Sen Ze
Join The Pajamas Revolution Now
By the way…
1. If you like the above technique, you can enhance it significantly with the addition of a few other mind-busting marketing techniques. Get my “Secret Sauce #1“ to multiply the impact of the above Marketing Technique for your own Restaurant. This Secret Sauce contains some additional, very powerful marketing tactics that are best known to restaurant operators and kept under wraps rather than being discussed here in public.
2. Get my “Secret Sauce #2“ to use and multiply the impact of the above Marketing Technique if you’re a Wedding Function Photographer.
3. Check out my previous post on Restaurant Marketing using the Customer’s own Credit Cards to bring them back again and again in a discussion on Loyalty Programs with a powerful twist.
4. Link to this post using this URL:
http://www.SenZe.com/business-blog/viral-marketing/viral-marketing.htm
