I am going to ruffle a lot of feathers with this one:

Now I know I am going to ruffle a lot of feathers with this one, but it needs to be said. Many will try to tell you that viral marketing is all you need. I have had people tell me that a campaign to promote a site was failing because I wasn’t using viral marketing. The funny thing about this was that the campaign was made specifically to be a viral marketing campaign. So not only do most not have a clue what viral marketing is, but they really don’t know what it can and can’t do. Now I am not saying that you should stay clear of all viral marketing. It does have it’s place. It just needs some old fashioned marketing along side of it.

Banner ads do work if it’s not a tech site:

Now you will hear all kinds of garbage about how banner ads don’t work anymore. The problem is that all the info is highly contaminated. There are tons of tech related sites that have only tech savvy readers. Those sites fail with banner ads it is true. The reason is that all those tech savvy users are using every kind of ad blocker they can to never see ads. This is killing their favorite sites, but they don’t seem to care. Now the great majority of people do not use these ad blockers and will never be able to keep ahead of the ad networks, so banner ads work for music sites. So when trying to pour some fuel onto your band’s viral marketing fire, a banner ad will work.

An example of viral marketing failure:

A few months ago I sent the word out to all the social networks I belong to that I would shave off my five foot ponytail if a certain amount of stories hit the front page of social music news site HeavyAsHell.com. The campaign was about as vial as you can get. But it never actually went “viral”. Now I’m sure that there will be “Internet Marketers” that can (and maybe will) nit pick apart the campaign and say in hind sight why it didn’t work. It’s real easy to sit on your high horse after the fact. The fact is that this was something that was helping kids with cancer and no one jumped on it. If that doesn’t work, what will? Now in full disclosure the campaign was saved last minute by an SEO friend of the site NowSourcing.com. Without Brian’s help it would have been a total failure. Would have been nice if it kick started the site the way it should have though. We still got to help the charity though, so half the goal was met. The point I want to make though is that the viral marketing alone failed.

Less than your band paid for all it’s equipment:

Now I am not talking insane amounts of money here. $2,000 for a month long campaign at FixionMedia would do amazing things for an unsigned band if done right (See my recent article on Pirate Bay for info). If you really want to kick it into full stream spend another $3,000 at IndieClick.com at the same time. This should be plenty enough to kick start your band’s next viral campaign.

If you are already famous you have the power to go viral:

Now some will give examples of how major things were done using services like Twitter. Well, those people are already celebrities of some level. Recently Mashable‘s Pete Cashmore crashed a few servers because he posted something on Twitter. The story tried to spin it as if it was a sign of how powerful Twitter was. The truth is that it was a sign of how powerful Pete Cashmore was. Leo Laporte may have grown his Twit Network “organically”, but he says all the time that he is riding the coattails of being on Tech Tv half a decade ago. Same with Digg. Would Digg be what it is today if it wasn’t for “The Dark Tipper” plugging the site on Tech TV? I’m willing to bet my left nut that HeavyAsHell.com would instantly explode if I was able to do a five minute class on Headbangers Ball showing people how to use it and why it’s so important to the scene. Kevin Rose did just that and it got him enough users instantly to let the site grow from there. Every business plan that has been able to use viral marketing had some old fashioned angle behind it.

In closing:

So save your pennies before trying to use viral marketing. It only works with an old fashioned marketing budget behind it. Don’t believe me? Check out the contest currently going at HeavyAsHell.com and see what we can’t even give away!