Last week there was a viral video sensation of Susan Boyle that was circulated on the internet to all the major media networks around the world. I saw the video of Susan Boyle on CNN and was stunned as everyone at the audience when they watched her sing live at Britain Got Talent.
The interesting thing to take a note about this incident is the viral effect of her popularity due to the speed of the video being transmitted on the web at a click of a mouse in hours. On Friday or Saturday she made a performance and within hours of the show went live lots of the fans uploaded the video on Youtube and it spread around the world like a wild fire. Within few hours and by now few days it has been watched over 47 million times already around the world. It has broken the previous viral video records of President Barack Obama Presidential Victory speech and Ex President George Bush shoe attack video.
So as a business like your restaurants what can you learn from this instant world wide viral marketing incident? Can you think if you could create one video of your restaurant that would go viral? What would it do to your restaurant business bottom line? The question now to ask yourself is if this sort of viral video can be created for your business that would have instant viral marketing worldwide for free.
The short answer is YES. Now lets look at the viral video more narrowly. Most of the viral videos that we see are not deliberate though people try to do so. It should be natural and organic. To tell you the truth you never know which one is going to be viral. So there fore one has to keep on recording videos and among may be 100′s video 1 of them will be a hit. And that’s all it takes. 1 video can do the magic like it did for Susan Boyle. This principle is very well executed by the holly wood movie distributors. They license several movies let’s say 10 or 20 to distribute around the country movie theatre. They really don’t know which one is going to be hit. Some will fail, the others do average and one will be super hit. Even others fail to make money, one that made big will recuperate all the investments and also make them profits on top of everything they lost on other movies.
I believe you as a restaurant business should follow the same formula. Every day at restaurants they have some kind of parties, or birthday celebration. When people are having good time with couple of drinks they start dancing with rejoice and happiness. May be you could capture this happy moments in your simple Sony video recorder or may be Flip video recorder which you can buy now for less than $100. Some of them might start singing like Susan Boyle without them realising it to be that good. You never know who has that talent and where and when it is going to come from. So the thing that you have to be on top of is to be prepared and ready with your stunt video camera to capture right then and there in your lenses. Once you record the song or funny dance you could upload on Youtube and embed it into your restaurant blog.Make sure that you take your customers permission. It is a courtesy. I am sure they would say Yes and would be delighted that you took the effort to capture in the video. In fact they would be surprised as no other competitors do it for them. If you want to see the example of videos or photos posted on the blog, you can check out Kogi Korean BBQ restaurant at www.kogibbq.com and learn how you can do the same for your restaurant.
So to get some fantastic free advertising from your viral video marketing, make sure you do make some occasional videos of your customers celebrating at your restaurant. You might be as lucky as Susan Boyle to capture that one viral video out of blues and that could be the ticket to your restaurant marketing success which you probably could not buy even with all the traditional medias like tvs, newspapers and radios.
You might not be able to handle all the crowd of fans that would rush to your restaurant. Well that is a good problem to have right.Please share your thoughts if this is something that is helpful to you and also if you have suggestion on what topics would help your restaurant marketing effort. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. It was so popular that they disabled the embed function on Youtube so here is the link of the video.
Viral Marketing is a brilliant and unique process of marketing your restaurant or any business which enables you to promote your product, service or brand quickly to thousands and sometimes even millions of people if done creatively.
The key here is to have a viral effect. Once the virus affects one person it gets spread to all the people that comes in contact with him. The number that is affected is in exponential as all the friends that got affected from the first person starts affecting all of their friends. This keeps on rolling like snow ball from the top of the mountain growing bigger and bigger before it lands to the bottom.
Watch the video as an example of viral video. The video is about a song called Numa Numa that was created by a simple guy like you and me. The number of downloads so far shows as I am writing this article is 24,536,700 views. The video demonstrates the power of viral effect it can have in your restaurant business if you do it as creatively as this guy. Can you imagine how powerful that marketing would be for your restaurant if you had one of your restaurant video watched over 24 million times all over the world.
The video is very natural and has very simple shots that he took right in front of his computer with ear catching music at the back ground. Now if this guy can do, you can do the same with your restaurant too. Go and do it as Nike likes to say ” Just Do It”
What four elements must be included to make Viral Marketing a successful?
Not all the marketing is made viral. However smart restauranteurs always aims for this kind of viral marketing whether it is in the form of viral video or viral photos. There are four key elements that have to be included if you want to make it successful. Lets say if you want to make one of your restaurant video viral, then it has to be natural. It should not look like cheesy advertisement that normal eyeballs are accustomed to. Second it has to be funny. If the video created the viewer to laugh that they could not control. Chances are that they are going to email it to all their friends. Thirdly the video should have emotional directresponse element in it. What I mean by that is you should display your product say your juicy burger so good and mouth watering that it compels him or her to try the burger next time or may be right away ifyour burger makes him salivate and come running to your restaurant. Lastly if your video has the sensational effect of a beautiful lady, it will help your video to be watched by more people even the
serious guy in the office with the dark specs who seemed never to be excited by the ladies.
How can your restaurant use viral marketing strategy?
It is very simple to use the viral marketing strategy and yet so many restaurants don’t use it to their advantages. I would encourage you to use this technique in your restaurant marketing effort . First of all it is free and it can be done by your self. Second it is far more effective than those flashy television advertisements that really don’t work effectively for the small restaurants.
One of the simple things you can do is start taking pictures of the customers while they are enjoying their birthday party. You can compile them and make a good slides of the beautiful pictures and send them to the birthday boy or girl via email. I will guarantee you that he or she is going to send it to all his or her friends.
Another thing you could do is start taking the video with your digital video camera or the Flip Video Camera that I recommend. It could be a graduation party at your restaurant. Once you get the video in your Flip Video Camera you can then directly upload it to your computer and Youtube. However it is very important to get the permission from your customer to make sure if you can upload it in Youtube just as a courtesy. More than so they will will not deny you as you have already built a relationship with them and have a common trust. Once you get their approval you can simply send them the link of the video. First they will will be so amaged that you pulled off such a great video shot which is such a treasure for their whole life which they can go back and watch even when they are ninety years old. They will be so grateful to you and be more loyal to your restaurant than the other average restaurant that doesn’t even bother to take some pictures. You will be amaged how you can have your own loyal customer do the most powerful marketing for your restaurant. Your customer will send those video links to their all the friends and relatives that were present there. In my opinion, this is much more powerful marketing than the TV, Newspaper,Yellowpages, and Radio marketing all combined.
