Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design

7. How Many Ways Can You Destroy Your Printer? Going Viral with a YouTube Video Contest That Plays upon Customer Frustrations

Expert Laser Services held a contest. They received only a handful of entries, yet it propelled impressive sales in new business. The Destroy Your Printer contest invited disgruntled businesspeople to create videos showing creative ways to destroy their nonfunctioning printers, copiers, or fax machines and blow off steam at the same time. Using the company's blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Expert Laser Services asked companies in the New England area to submit a short movie of employees destroying a piece of office equipment.

Why It Works

“I would get so frustrated with a malfunctioning copier or printer,” says Nathan Dube, Expert Laser Services social media engineer. After doing a quick Twitter search, Dube found that many people felt the same way. They received videos of printers being tossed off buildings, hunted down in the woods, or being fed into a log splinter. It's not the number of entries that matters—it's the number of viewers and the publicity that the contest generated that counts. Dube made a promotional video that has been seen by more than 5,000 visitors on YouTube. “The bottom line is we gained new sales,” says Michael Carpentier, the company's president, “and a cover story in Recycler magazine.” Carpentier says that the contest ...