If I were you, I would reach out to wedding planners. Approach them as the experts that they (hopefully) are. You could offer to pay them $100 or something to take a quick look at your software and provide feedback for you. It would probably take them less than 30 minutes, so I’m guessing that would be enough to tempt them. If they end up liking it, which I’m assuming they will, I’ll bet you they refer all of their clients to you. A lot of wedding planners hand out lists of ‘preferred vendors’ and useful tools to brides. It would be worth giving this a trial run to get on those lists.

Just a thought.

-Erica

Hmmm… you could put a tracking URL on that :

/Download2 or whatever
or ?Refferredby=EmailWithProgram

I (like you, I suspect) love to meeasure things. I’d be curious to know.

Very objective blog you have. I like it.

Regarding your post. You didn’t mentioned vertical marketing. I guess in your case for PerfectTablePlan with specific target group you have a lot of benefits to promote your software to wedding agencies and places where the most weddings are taking places. It is quite easy and really VERTICAL for your target group I guess.

I do have some partnerships and wholesale agreements with other businesses. I haven’t been actively seeking them out though because I don’t have the resources. Also experience tells me that the effort to reward ratio is often low. It might be a different story if my software was $3,500 rather than $35.

Just a thought.

I’ve been reading this post page by page and agreeing completely until this page. I really don’t think that what you’re calling Viral Marketing is, well, viral marketing.

I’ve worked in a few advertising agencies (always on the technical side of things) and the general idea of Viral Marketing is something that you start but that gains a life of its own. The best example I can think of with regards to this is the “Will It Blend” guys. http://www.willitblend.com/.

They’ve successfully transitioned from advertising, to viral marketing and in fact secured themselves as an internet meme.

Otherwise, great article!

j.

I did actually think about doing something like this as an animation. But I think its really tough to create something that is truly viral and also promotes your product. Talking to film students is an interesting idea though.

For the sake of completeness here is another way to do viral marketing. You can create something other than software that people willingly pass around that somehow promotes your business. In your case you could create a comical video showing the disasters that can happen when you don’t plan your wedding table properly and Crazy Uncle Bob ends up sitting next Sensitive Martha (or whatever).

Video is probably ambitious for most small businesses (although film students are always looking for projects, FYI) but other things might work. Creativity is a must for this kind of thing.

Pros: could be lots of fun

Cons: ambitious, not necessarily going to work.

Data point: nil