HP has demonstrated how a viral marketing campaign using blogs can become a huge success on many fronts. Marketing Pilgrim reports on HP’s use of 31 of the top tech blogs and how HP partnered with them to deliver a marketing program.
Here is how HP put the whole thing together – and, apart from the cost, you have to admit the whole process was really quite simple:
They called it 31 Days of the Dragon. They contacted 31 tech bloggers with influence (based on number of links, Google ranking, and recommendations from other bloggers) to give away 31 laptops in 31 days. So essentially a month of contests. Each blogger made up their own rules about the contest but each agreed to promote the contests of everyone else in the group.
The result – over 25,000 contestants and over 350,000 links. In the search engines, the first five pages of results where related to one of those blogs. For a marketing campaign, those are impressive statistics. Even better statistics where the sales of the Dragon – up 85%.
Viral marketing can be successful; the key in this case was not to use their own sites to promote a product, rather to use blogs in related niches to write articles with on your products with links back to your homepage. Offer them an incentive and let them have their heads. Viral marketing at its best.
