You’re no doubt familiar with the term Viral Marketing. At its most basic definition, Viral Marketing is getting people to pass on (most often via email) your marketing campaign. This could be a game, video, an image, a link to webpage or blog post.

Most often these campaigns drive brand awareness rather than individual product sales. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken may not have driven home the “Eat this specific chicken sandwich” message as well as say, Chik-fil-a’s long-running adorably illiterate cow campaign. But I’m sure that during the height of that campaign, many people who were deciding between fast-food joints gave BK a try when they might not have before. To many large-scale practitioners, viral campaigns are about a favorable brand image and lots of good WOM (word of mouth).

If you’re a company living in the B2B space, you may be under the impression that popular consumer sites offer viral features that are simply too expensive and overarching for the B2B world. Even though many of the highly-publicized viral campaigns often feature absurd videos, risqué content, games, or a combination thereof, there’s still something B2B marketers can take away from these consumer techniques to exponentially increase brand awareness and sales.

KISS it
“Send to a friend” may sound casual and consumer, but this is a basic viral tactic everyone can take advantage of. Often in a B2B setting, the person searching a Website for information has to move that information along to the person or people making the ultimate decision to write the check. Making it as easy and persuasive as possible to do this part of their job can be a huge bonus to your business.

If your products or services need a group of people to ultimately approve the purchase, at the very least, put a “Share with a colleague” link to facilitate this communication. Giving them a quick form to fill out and email links to product pages just got your site that many more exposures.  Just with a single link on the page!

This most basic option starts to scratch at what you’re really doing behind-the-scenes here: controlling the discourse of your customers. You, more than anyone, know the right way for customers to reach consensus on buying your product/service. Why not give that person spreading the message the support they need to close the sale for you?

Instead of just emailing a link, let them send a nicely designed, automated email speaking directly to that audience. For example, if your product is enterprise software, the IT person who needs it will be searching your site based on the solution itself. But she needs to convince her colleagues, the director of IT, and the CFO that it’s a good idea. Of course all of these people need to know different things about the product to make an informed decision.

A link to the same product page that thrills the original person browsing the site isn’t going to do a thing for the CFO. But what if your site generated her an email of ROI information to send along? Now you’ve not only made her job of sending the information easier, you’ve made her most difficult job – convincing the CFO – that much easier. And in the process, you’ve opened up new doors to your site content, and exposed your brand virally, in a truly valuable, persuasive way.

This applies to customers who need to sell your products in a down-channel environment as well. By reformatting emails to speak on behalf of your customers – to their customers – you’re helping them maintain a professional level of brand awareness. What’s more, their brand awareness is yours. When you make it easy for your customers to market themselves, they’re more than happy to do it with your products.

Top Sellers isn’t just for Amazon
Lists of “Most-viewed Pages” or, “Top Sellers” work because in the anonymous world of the Web, people are always searching for consensus. Take advantage of this common curiosity by dynamically generating a list on your home page or category-level pages to direct your users.

Not only will they feel more comfortable navigating your site, these lists (even if they’re just your featured pages or products) are often convenient shortcuts to the pages they want to get to anyway, which makes your site more usable. When they get to a recommended page they’re happy with, hit ‘em with a “Send to a friend” link and close a nice viral loop to market your site.

There’s always incentives
Of course your audience doesn’t spend all of their time at the office. With the idea of a “work-life balance” gaining more importance, viral incentive campaigns can focus on motivating with more consumer-based promotional products.

An iPod may have nothing to do with your product line, but it has everything to do with a parent of teenagers. It’s very hard to justify spending $300 on a walkman for kids. It becomes a lot easier to justify when it’s a giveaway with a $30,000 product they were going to buy sooner or later for their company anyway.

You’ll get the sale faster, and associate your brand with something cool. Put your logo on it, and get brand exposure on all the highly-valued time spent out of the office.

Especially in industries that are highly commoditized, a buying decision may get tipped from a competitor towards you because you’re also offering a pack of movie tickets. Another nice fact is that because they’re B2B, it’s easy to classify these promotions as sales incentives, not lotteries, which clears a lot of the legal headaches.

Flash games can work for you
Emailing or advertising appropriate Flash games to your clients is another efficient way to get the viral message spreading. It would seem a waste to send your clients a branded version of Pac-man. But how much would they love a branded industry-specific crossword they can work on with colleagues. Or a putting game they can forward? Or industry-related trivia?

One of the most effective B2B viral games we’ve recently been involved with is a home-run hitting contest. It lent itself easily to branding, and allowed people to email their longest home run distance along with a link to the game. Thousands of people forwarded it. We also created a branded version of the game Concentration for a tradeshow booth and it was a huge hit.

Games are an especially good idea for the holidays to really spread your message as a gift of game for workers looking for ways to fill their days with work-related fun over the holiday slowdown.

Often, these Flash games can be done within traditional print campaign budget parameters, and when was the last time you shared a postcard with a friend anyway?

It’s OK to be funny
It’s a fact: people like to forward funny things. There are a few conditions, like it can’t devalue or criticize your audience, or deprecate your business. But you can take advantage of office humor to spread the message that you’re here to help.

What if you took a few pictures of someone sitting in a cubicle with a Flash count-up clock and the caption, “Joe’s working around the clock until his sales goals are met” – and add the simple “Help Joe by forwarding this page to a friend” or “join our newsletter and we’ll let you know if Joe makes it” will easily inspire your audience to give your brand viral exposure just by making it fun within the work context.

One challenge we dealt with recently was a monthly special product email campaign. The client wanted to send it out weekly, but after the initial email, readership dropped significantly. To solve this with a viral twist, they changed the message to weekly tips of what not to do, offering the monthly special as a solution and call to action.

The result? Over 50% opens, and triple the forwards. On an email sent every week for the same product.

I hope you see that the value in creating effective viral marketing isn’t necessarily with big-budget chickens or scantily-clad bartenders. Viral marketing that makes a difference to your audience is about looking at their social networks – at the office, and even at home – to help make their lives a little better, a little easier, and a little more fun. Your company will always be right there to reap the rewards of a campaign that reaches far beyond your core demographic.

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