Our Solutions are Custom. Viral and guerilla marketing campaigns are not a cookie-cutter affair. To achieve our full results, we have to think long and hard about your business, your customers, and how to subvert the ways your customers already do natter on to each other. If it were simple, you wouldn't need our experience and advice.

Just as with building stickiness, where you have to give people a real and compelling reason to return to your site, effective marketing is not about the printing or the programming, but the actual message and offering these tools communicate. Every Internet marketing campaign is custom package which is necessarily unique.

That said, the components which follow are a few of the classic ideas.

Tell a friend about this site. In fact, we can let your visitors generate any kind of custom email form letter you can dream up, including this now-standard technique we pioneered nearly ten years ago.

Email this Article. Rather than send a generic message about the website, a more targeted and effective tool is to actually email the content or article to a friend. This works hand in hand with a comprehensive content strategy.

Fax or Download this Article. To make it as easy as possible to pass material on to a friend, we can generate a Fax or PDF document from your content on the Web — from articles, data sheets, and marketing materials. These faxes and PDF documents can be generated on-the-fly with custom content from a interactive form on your website or from a database, or we can generate a custom fax cover sheet including a note from your visitor.

A Useful Free Service. Whether it's a funky electronic postcard, or a free interactive feature to help people to keep in touch, Direct Leap can give people something new and hip to tell their friends about. We can make it unique, and take even old ideas to elicit the feel of what has never before been seen.

Tracking and Rewarding Referrals. We can install a system to allow your business to offer sales commissions, discounts, loyalty programs, or a cash reward for each referral brought in by your customers, sales people, affiliates or partners. We can set up a different rate structure for each type of referral reward.

Monitoring Effectiveness. Collecting data about how your people heard about the site, which content features people pass on to friends, and how business decisions impact this over time is key to understanding and optimizing the process.

Get Creative! We'll design a contest where visitors get one ballot for each friend they sign up. We can do anything — your marketing program is limited only by our collective imagination.

Viral Marketing Strategy Consulting

Doing viral marketing successfully is complicated, and you need all the help you can get. We have done well both by simply lubricating the process of referral, and using very powerful viral strategies, and we are happy to work out a plan with you.

The following ideas are a few of the classic components of a viral strategy.

Content Development. Give people something that they would actually want to tell someone about. This might be great content, a promotion or a loss-leader, or just a fun animation or fresh multimedia piece on a postcard. Direct Leap has managed very large and successful content and electronic publishing projects, and we can both source and create compelling content or promotional premiums, offering real value, to attract customers to your business.

Naturally Viral Technologies. There is a category of tools which which naturally require users of the system to submit lists of people — their friends, their users, their employees — in order to use a service. If you service is to distribute email birthday cards, your users must first upload a list of their friends.

The classic example is Friendster, still in beta, where the value of the service equals the size of your network. Only once your friends invite their own social circle to post a profile on the system, is the purpose of the system reached — to virtually network with people who you haven't yet met through your mutual friends. In order to use the system, you must invite your friends.

Helping Your Users to Advertise. Another category of naturally viral technologies are tools used to communicate or to touch other people. The "Get free, web-based email from Hotmail.com" message stamped into the bottom of every email sent through its service message is, for those who want it, a little referral to use the service. In a way, you're printing free advertising, and this is effective for as long as there is a demand for the service.

Offer Good, Honest Value. The clear way to create a loyal — even fanatical — following for your service is to make it the best in the world, bar none. If it truly is a better way, sophisticated opinion leaders will use it, understand it, and articulate the unique value of your service in the classic 'cool-making' process. Especially when selling into corporations, it's the real value that attracts the first, referenceable customers that constitute your beachhead for selling to the followers.

If your goal is to take a product or service — whether it's still a vague concept or it's already a market leader — and to transform it to be the best in the world, give us a call. We will build a new vision to reach into an uncharted future, understand and solve problems, and our developers will then execute on these ideas to make them real — this, in a word, is what we do.