'House' Designs His Own Subliminal Viral Marketing

Oct. 13, 2009 - PRLog -- Brattleboro VT.If you haven't watched the Fox TV series "House," you have undoubtedly heard about it, as it approaches its sixth season. The show has a huge fan base, and for the premiere of the new season, they have created a catchy icon--an adaptation of the traditional medical caduceus of snakes wound around a cane, in place of a staff. This is to indicate that house carries a cane and that he is also a doctor. They're calling it "snakes on a cane," and the image has been appearing in NY subways and in various strategic areas around the country.

Why is this cool?

It's a bit of viral marketing. The play on words is catchy. Rather than the movie title "Snakes on a Plane," the twist is a little smile, something that people will remark about and spread around. It's actually quite a bit of genius.

Big companies pay a lot of attention to viral marketing because it is so powerful. They spend millions of dollars studying and testing and tweaking to get their message out there -- and by out there I mean WAY out there -- the bigger the reach, the more profits that can be made.

The good news is that you won’t have to spend millions, or even hundreds of dollars to have a successful viral marketing campaign that you can use for lead generation. All you have to do is watch what the "big boys" are doing and do it yourself, for your business or product.

Netflix does some really interesting things, too. First of all, Netflix actually has an amazing product and a really amazing service, and that is really rule number one for getting anything to go viral. It has to be something worth talking about. The second thing they do right -- which again, you can copy and apply to your business -- is they incentivize you to tell your friends. They do this by giving you the ability to give your friends or family a free or an inexpensive trial of Netflix.  

So say for a holiday, for example, like Father's Day, they could do a Father's Day promotion.  They could say to you, "Give your dad the gift of Netflix.  Go ahead and give your dad one month free to try out our service." Well, that's pretty cool, right? You can give your dad a month free of Netflix, and if your dad likes it, he becomes a customer.  

You will want to think about what twists you can come up with on this idea in terms of giving your friends or your family or your business associates discounts, trials and other really cool stuff in exchange for passing your information along. Using a squeeze page and asking people to sign up for the free offer before they get your freebie works well for purposes of lead generation, as well.

Bottom line is you want to pay very close attention to what other companies and marketers are doing. Be on the lookout for things that are similar to these Fox or Netflix examples. You will start to see marketing tricks like this everywhere, and you can just apply them to what you are doing. You will be amazed at all the different ways companies try to get you to spread the word, and if you analyze what they are doing and how they are doing it, you will have no problem coming up with creative ways to apply in your Internet marketing business, and get your message or product to go viral to boost your lead generation efforts, too.

It's all about lead generation and building your list, and that's what your viral marketing efforts should be based around. For more information about viral marketing, come to Tellman Knudson's ListBuilding Club and see how well we can make your lead generation tactics improve. Come to http://listbuilding.com and become a member today!

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Founded in 2004, Overcome Everything, Inc. began when Tellman Knudson founded List Crusade. Since then, the corporation's most popular site has become The ListBuilding Club, where new Internet marketers quickly learn to build a solid online business.