5 Crappy Ways To Get Your Company Noticed Online

Those darned marketing gurus! They only teach you “proper” ways of getting brand recall. Like improving your product or finding out what your customers really want. Don’t they know that those things cost money? And for what? Hundreds of loyal, paying customers?

Why waste your time on those when you can just do a crappy online campaign instead?

After all, any publicity is good publicity, even ones that piss people off.

At least they care enough to hate your brand.

If you want to be famous (image be damned), here are 5 cheap and easy ways to annoy your way to popularity.

#1 Hold a Facebook Like Contest

There’s no need to sort the 568 entries for Mr. and Ms. Strawberry Yummy Jam photo. It’s not like you’re going to run a serious print ad or pictorial using the winner anyway.

What’s more important is you force those 568 contestants to pester 500 (or more) friends to “Like” your Facebook Page and their contest entry, thus allowing you to reach 253,400  people for the very low price of 2 gift certificates! And speaking of gift certificates…

#2 Give Useless or Intangible Prizes

Like I said, cheap and easy ways. No need to offer something with actual value. Some ideas:

• Promise “exposure” on your website that gets 8 visitors a day
• Give a 50% discount card for last year’s stock inventory
• Free 30-minute spa treatment to a remote place that no one ever visits

Always ask yourself: “Is this worth begging and spamming 500 friends for a Facebook like?”

If the answer is “Not in hell”, then you’re on the right track.

#3 Let Them Pay First

“Tweet 10 photos of yourself wearing 10 different pants from our Spring 2013 collection to get 50% off the 11th pair of pants.”

Genius.

Totally worth a gift certificate. Maybe two.

#4 Steal Famous Campaigns

“Wow, Big Burger Brand won international awards for their Eat-A-Giant-Burger-While-Skydiving contest, let’s hold a similar one for our Auto Repair Shop!”

At the very least: you get to ride on Big Burger Brand’s popularity.

If you’re lucky: someone will make a meme mocking your campaign, it will become viral on a slow news day, and hordes of angry netizens will descend on your website/Facebook page to complain. (Keyword being: hordes)

#5 Be Evil

People *love* tweeting, blogging, and posting rants about unethical companies online. There are a lot of cases of companies using natural disasters and unfortunate incidents to promote their brand. Just look how popular their campaigns have become!

You know who else is online?

Major news outlets and TV networks.

They’re always on the lookout for the next People-Are-Horrible-Life-Sucks-We’re-All-Going-To-Die feature story. So play your cards right, and you might even see your company’s name on the nightly news!

“Clothes all wet due to #tsunami? Buy better, stylish clothing from us at 50% off today.”

“Fight malnutrition. For every $29.99 burger you buy, $0.05 will go to our feeding program. Help us reach our $1.8M goal by next month.”

To conclude

Be cheap. Be loud. Be evil.

Ω