While word-of-mouth and incentivized marketing campaigns are a good start to make your company “go viral,” there’s an old-fashioned and highly-effective method to keep your company’s name fresh in the public eye: Street team marketing.
You’ve seen them before, handing out flyers, wearing costumes and dancing on the side of the street. While you may throw away the flyer or laugh at the guy wearing the costume, you do remember them. And the next time you need something that company sells, you will remember their company first. It’s search engine optimization done in real time.
If your company doesn’t have a physical product, you can still create a street team online. These search engine marketing people do the online equivalent of going out in the streets and handing out flyers.
One strategy to improve your website ranking is to create a fun area that does not necessarily deal with what your company offers, but relates to your brand. Offer things like free wallpapers and backgrounds, screen savers, pretty copy and paste HTML links for Facebook and MySpace banners, and other promotional tools that link back to your website. These online banners and screensavers can boost your website performance by doing the Internet marketing for you by giving you free publicity. You could back this up with an offer code for some kind of discount or promotion for users that visit your website through this page, and spread the link juice around.
An example would be, if you are an acupuncture clinic, and you had a “games” section on your website that had, say, a game of, “pin the tail on the donkey” (with acupuncture needles). If you let people take the code for this game to post on their website (with your site being credited and linked to). Even if you only offered soothing pictures to use as screen savers, people would come back to get more, and keep visiting your page. You can then use excellent website content and traditional website marketing strategy to keep them visiting.
