Viral marketing is an idea that is passed through the community much like a common cold. It encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, essentially it is a fancy term for word of mouth advertising It is any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do. Word of mouth is still one of the most effective marketing techniques, online or offline. As a result Viral marketing is a phenomenon that occurs when the creative message you're trying to convey resonates deeply with the audience you're speaking to.
Build a viral marketing product - don't just try to market a product virally
A product is not necessarily viral if it contains a few features that lend viral characteristics to it. Just having a "Recommend to a friend" option on one of your web pages doesn't make your website viral. For the free viral product to be considered truly viral, more than 1 new user must result from each user recommending it.
A successful viral marketing campaign also relies on the behavior of your customers. You need customers who are outgoing, friendly, and lead an active lifestyle. The more people that surround your customer, the more impressions your viral marketing tool will have. Remember, viral marketing, or any advertising, works best when you can achieve multiple impressions with the least amount of effort. The last person you want to test viral marketing on is some recluse that sits inside eighteen hours a day and emerges only to restock the fridge and drive to work.
Free valuable product or service is a powerful incentive for interested viewers. If you have access to one which you can afford to offer free (e-books for example), your viral marketing will get a boost. Whatever you offer free, it must translate to immediate tangible or intangible benefit(s), so people will get attracted in no time. While so doing, earn revenue from selling ads or selling some other product or service.
A classic example of extremely successful Viral Marketing was the campaign for the email service Hotmail. When the company launched, every outgoing message from this platform contained an advertisement for Hotmail and a link to its website at the bottom of the email. As people emailed their friends and colleagues, they were also advertising the service.
The advantage in exponential replication efficiency over the standard traffic generator that does not
have viral programs, but only other traffic building programs is quite significant and means a shift in the viral marketing niche and viral internet marketing world at large. Like the company hotmail that was studied as a case study example earlier in the article, efficiently, directly trackably and measurably, obtain large amounts of website exposure and the benefits that exposure affords.
Viral marketing is in this way a high risk, high gain means of marketing. It is changing all the time and there are not really any experts that can accurately predict how the marketplace will respond. Fortunately the cost is not measured in financial terms, but only in the way the public perceives the brand. Get it right and a brand can become suddenly very prominent in secondary media articles and traditional media.
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