Comments on: Niche Marketing Is The Key To Viral Marketing

By: ThomasK

ThomasK — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:54:12 +0000

Viral marketing is a powerful tool, but a large number of viral campaigns fall apart in the initial steps. I read a good article “A Case Study of a Viral Post“. One of the most important things is to get your viral campaing noticed on big sites/media in order for it to spread efficiently in ‘influential ripples’.

By: Eric Kintz

Eric Kintz — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:54:14 +0000

Web 2.0 tools have allowed the scaling of viral marketing activities to niches, because it has dramatically reduced the publishing and distribution costs. You needed to go mass market in a monolithic TV world, but each blog can cater to 50 people, because the cost of that blog is close to zero. This dynamic changes fundamentally how we think about reaching consumers and catering to their interests.
Eric

By: Karl

Karl — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:40:11 +0000

@Mack believe me there is a lot of competition for the keyword “star wars” and “video game”, not a lot comes from google, but more from people all over the place linking to it. My point is that it was enough of a niche for people to get it on the front page of digg, thats the small passionate niche.

@Gregg great point on not wanting to stay niche, but I guess sometimes thing move to mainstream by being elevated by the passionate niche. Kitten War was a niche, ended up on the Colbert report.

By: Greg Verdino

Greg Verdino — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:18:24 +0000

Hey Karl -

I think the ability to light a spark within a tightly focused niche is absolutely key to igniting a viral fire. Of course at the end of the day, few marketers are going niche with the intention of staying niche. Everyone wants to break out of the echo chamber and ride the wave that can carry them from cult favorite to out-and-out mainstrream sensation.

So I’d add that it is important to taget a niche, but not just ay niche — but a niche that engages in active, multi-faceted conversation. This is why marketers reach out to bloggers - even bloggers that might not seem to fall within the marketer’s stated target audience. Why? because bloggers talk - on their blogs, on twitter, in Facebook, over email, on the phone, at meetups, etc. — and talk breeds talk.

By: Cliff Allen

Cliff Allen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:13:21 +0000

Prior to the Internet becoming popular, marketers talked about market segments with large numbers of people, which made network TV buys economical.

However, we’ve become so Cluetrained that marketers need to pay more attention to the niches that consumers form on their own. It’s interesting to watch the micro niches that are created by people using SureToMeet to invite people to their private events, and discuss the event online before and after attending.

For example, no marketer would have targeted — or even known about — “Ultimate Frisbee players who work in the entertainment industry in L.A.” It’s a growing micro niche because people who are interested in it know friends who are, too. So, they invite their friends to join in. I don’t know if any of them clicked on the Ultimate Frisbee ads that Google puts on their pages, but they had to buy that gear somewhere.

By: Mack Collier

Mack Collier — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 02:33:22 +0000

“In fact my most viewed content on the site is two very niche blog posts my top ten list of star wars t-shirts, and my top ten list of video game t-shirts (and as they are months old and still get about 50% of my traffic they also demonstrate how the long tail works on niches as well).”

Yeah but I would assume these both get plenty of search traffic from ‘Star Wars’ and ‘video games’, right?

And I get the point you’re making about niches, but let’s be honest, anything that appears on Boing Boing is going to get a huge spike in traffic/hits/links/subscribers. Granted, it’s easier for Boing Boing to pick up on something if more people are blogging about it, but all it takes is one of the writers finding it, and it’s gone.