What is Viral Marketing
In the world of business today, competition is an unavoidable feat. Companies that are of the same league can go neck to neck in endorsing whose product is better. Since endorsement can be difficult, businessmen must come up with unique ways of convincing costumers.
Viral marketing is an act of promoting the idea of a product in a very compelling and appealing way that a consumer will feel the need to recommend it to his friends and family. This technique arose from the fact that devising effective online marketing strategies nowadays can be a difficult challenge. We also know that most information nowadays is available online, and almost everybody have access to the internet. This method is not entirely new, since it is a derivative of the most basic technique in advertising: “word-of-mouth” marketing.
How does one execute this strategy? An example can be through utilization of emails. A person can begin by, say, 5 friends about a product or a service. In the mail, the person indicates that he would be glad if the recipient forwards the mail to more people. If the recipient chooses to forward the mail, then more people will be aware of the first sender’s product. The idea spreads in a similar way that a virus does, hence the term viral marketing.
Before haphazardly jumping subscribing into this technique, a person must first know how effective this strategy is. Basically, being viral can be either self-agitated or induced.
A self-agitated viral marketing is one that doesn’t require much effort to be advertised. For example, people who have access to the internet are using Google, YouTube and Facebook on a daily basis. These sites don’t have to put much effort in advertising; it spreads on its own. Why? This is because people are already aware of the existence of these, and feels the need to access. It’s like putting fire in a dry forest: the fire spreads if one person lets it.
The second one is viral marketing that is induced. These are the ones that didn’t have a strong head start. However, since these ideas leave a great impression on a person, the receiver then chooses to spread it to people he knows. Examples of these are videos on YouTube that goes viral. They can either be funny, entertaining or even provocative; as long as they make the viewers hooked, these videos will be considered viral.
There is a lot of advantage to viral marketing. First, since you rely completely on the impression that your ad will create, the investment in promotion will cost less. In fact, in the previous example, the only effort exerted was to create an email and send it to a number of people. Also, as people become more informed about your product or service, it builds rapport towards a stable clientele. Viral marketing may also stabilize SEO effect on your brand name. All it takes is a little creativity and knowledge of potential sites where becoming viral can be easy to achieve.
Execution is the next thing that one needs to learn upon understanding the advantages of using viral marketing strategy. The email technique is the first method one can use, as described earlier. Another technique that can be used is utilization of social media.
The easiest that one can use is YouTube. People today are inclined into viewing videos that are viral and those that have a potential of being one. One good example is the Volvo advertisement that features Jean Claude Van Dame’s awesome split while standing between two trucks. This hit caused Volvo to have an increase 36% on sales on November 2013. It even received a lot of mock and response videos from hundreds of YouTube users. Another example is BlendTec’s “Will It Blend?” channel, where they feature how stable and reliable their product is by blending a variety of items into the BlendTec blender. Both of these are great examples of viral marketing.
Facebook is a popular niche for viral marketing. By 2009, the time spent for using of this social medium has already exceeded the time dedicated for creating and sending emails. People in this site are actively sharing items that are either intriguing or controversial. An example of a viral item in Facebook is the news about fake deaths of some celebrities. Of course, this information is not true. However, since the premise is highly provocative it becomes completely viral.
So how can one assure that his advertisement becomes viral? The first thing that one has to consider is that the idea should be creative, out-of-the-box and spontaneous (as we may have already pointed out). In a generation where everything is readily available online, information in the internet can easily be lost unless it is unique and exceptional.
Once your ad is interesting enough, the next thing you need to consider is connectivity. The objective is to create something extremely entertaining or appealing, that it associates the service you are selling to the “virus” that you have created. Remember Kool Aid? When you say “oh yeah!” in the similar tone that the Kool Aid mascot did it, it instantly triggers the product in a person’s mind. Furthermore, deeper association in the mind also assures longevity.
Lastly, the advertiser needs to consider the platform where he will put his potential viral item. It has to be large, popular and widely used. As we have discussed earlier, social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter can be great places to try this viral marketing scheme. There are also services available that let you acquire likes or views to assure that your video or page becomes viral. These may cost you a little amount, but on the other hand, it lessens the worry of your effort going to waste.
Overall, viral marketing scheme has already been proven effective to a lot of businesses today, both on and off the internet. The investment in this kind of advertising is low, but the potential profit can elevate your brand name into high altitudes. Not only that, it also assures that your product will be remembered easily by consumers everywhere.