The principle behind viral marketing is that it encourages other people to pass on your marketing message to others. The advantage of getting individuals to pass on a marketing message is that these people become your marketing team, for free.
The marketing buzz (buzzwords) produces an increase in brand awareness to achieve marketing objectives, usually sales, through 'viruses' that spreads by word of mouth and by the internet. Viral marketing on the internet can take the form of video clips, flash games, ebooks, software images, text messages, web pages, memes, and so forth.
Peaked in popularity in the 1990s, viral marketing was known as word of mouth marketing. Today, the internet viral marketing provides a number of ways to engage in word or mouth marketing efficiently at a potentially very low cost.
Viral marketing works when the following three criteria meet:
- Messenger that includes: the subject that receives, the subject's social connection and the amplifying receiver.
- Message that is both memorable and interesting to be passed on to others.
- Environment that includes timing, context, culture and other specific subjects.
The ultimate goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to create viral messages that appeal to individuals with high social networking potential (SNP) and that have a high probability of being presented and spread by these individuals and their competitors in their communications with others in a short period of time.
The golden rules in such communication are that the message should be clear and concise.
Using Social Media
Social media is where people share, meet and greet. As social media's popularity increases, these places have become a common place to visit while people are online. More than half of the internet's population has at least one account, creating an ecosystem so massive that it holds a tremendous capacity to be effective.
This type of online marketing has given many powerful benefits, mainly because:
- A majority of consumers actively participate in social networking activities on a daily basis.
- Information distributed through social media tends to travel from person to person very quickly.
- Information passed have a certain level of credibility.
- Messages are delivered directly to the desktops/laptops/mobile phones of a captive audience.
- People who actively engage in social networking tend to utilize it as a resources for giving and receiving information.
When a message went viral, marketers can just look and observe with less to nothing they can do to stop or control it. As said earlier, viral marketing is like creating a virus - just watch it spread until it reaches its peak before it finally becomes irritating and "antibodies" began to wipe it away.
Viral videos, memes, viral comments, status updates, tweets , blogs, pins and so on. They all serve one thing. An immediate burst of interest. A spur of the moment spike in the content sharing activity due to the culmination of multiple factors, generating mass curiosity using extreme emotions.
People will either love it or hate but but won't ignore it, resulting in a large number of shares, views and a large volume of the ensuing discussions.
Viral marketing is best done for a short burst of time. Many viral marketing approaches have been used over the years, but while they were able to capture large numbers of users, they proved ineffective for long-term campaign.
While a viral marketing strategy may initially be a good approach to reach your audience for a long-term, viral marketing does increase brand awareness. Thus increasing the effectiveness of your business marketing strategy.