Welcome Intro:

Welcome to Demo 2.0! The purpose of this newsletter is to keep you up-to-date with the latest online marketing and demo practices, tips and examples of what online marketers in the software industry are doing to keep their brand and products in the public eye.

We hope you will find this monthly newsletter helpful and informative. We welcome your personal contributions to further enrich this publication so please don’t hesitate to contact us and share your point of view.

Special Feature:

Three Little Reminders when embracing a Viral Campaign

In today’s age of on-demand media and content, a viral campaign can be as elusive as winning a state lottery. If you manage to get lucky you can be reaping the marketing rewards for quite some time.

Viral marketing focuses on leveraging existing social networks by encouraging customers to share product information with their friends. One of the main reasons these campaigns have the potential of becoming so successful is that they can relatively bypass many spam filters with ease since they are passed on from one friend onto many. A great example was the rapid development is Scope mouthwash’s “Send a Kiss” promotion. Procter & Gamble provided a mechanism by which users could send a branded animated greeting to others on any given holiday. A more recent example of success is Office Max’s Elf Yourself, a game where players could insert their own pictures on animated elves to do a little song and dance for Christmas.

Below are some key points to keep in mind when trying to launch a successful viral marketing campaign for web 2.0.

• No Selling. Stay away from the urge to advertise to your viewers.
• Entertain your Readers. Produce something that people want to share.
• Encourage Involvement. Viewers should want to interact with your posted content or media by starting related blogs or reviews

As you look into your own viral campaign opportunities keep the above observations in mind. And who knows…if done right you could be the one writing the next article on “How to take your Viral Campaign Airborne”.

Using Demos to Tie Your Online Marketing Together

How today’s marketers can make the most use out of their online channels.

One of the biggest challenges in online marketing is that there are many places to spend your budget. In trying to make use of every marketing channel available, it is easy to fragment your marketing plan and fail to make the most out of your advertising efforts. In larger companies, different parts of the marketing department are responsible for different aspects of online marketing. There is a team to handle the web site, a team for advertising, a team to handle blogs and a team responsible for creating product demos. In these cases, it’s hard for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing.

The beginning of the year is a great time to take stock of all your online marketing efforts. When planning for 2008, look for ways to leverage and cross promote your product demos. You may find some easy ways to make your marketing dollars go further.

For example, if you have invested heavily in lead generation through pay-per-click ads and banners, don’t just send them to a campaign-specific landing page, make use of other online resources as well. If your company has produced valuable product demos or actively participates in a user community, use these resources to keep your leads engaged. For example, if your company generally only offers demos from the web site, there is no reason why these demos can’t also be promoted in email campaigns, on blogs and even as a call-to-action in pay-per-click campaigns. Online demos provide a great platform for use in any internet marketing channel.

Once you have identified all of your online marketing programs, map them out. Start with the entry points and draw the process all the way through to the call-to-action and end result. See if your programs overlap or intersect. Do all of your marketing programs make use of your product demos? If not, it may be easy to start connecting the dots. Online demos are easily branded to match any campaign – and the same demo can be repurposed for different audiences. If you make use of customer profiling, you can even customize your demo to fit the targeted audience. With that in mind, begin looking for opportunities to tie your marketing efforts together – places where before it wasn’t obvious that a product demo would be a good fit.

When planning for 2008, take a stock of all your resources, tie together as many of your programs as possible and create a web that will catch the most high quality leads with the most efficient budget.