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When you make a purchase of a service or item and recommend said service or item to a friend who purchases, you are practicing a form of viral marketing. Expressing your satisfaction with a product or service by telling everyone you know is viral marketing. Essentially, you’ve advertised through word of mouth.
That is the whole deal behind viral marketing. It’s an advertising strategy that gets people to pass on a marketing message that easily spreads out, exponentially, like a virus.
Now, the concept behind viral marketing isn’t a new one, in fact, it’s been around for centuries. However, there wasn’t a name for until 1997 when a venture capitalist came up with the term in reference to Window Hotmail’s marketing practice of appending an ad to each email message of all their users. To put in simply, a receiver of an Hotmail email clicks on their link in the email, the receiver signs up and advertises Windows Hotmail each time he/she sends out an email. And so on and so on it goes. Growth, like this, is referred to as an exponential curve.
Application of a viral marketing strategy can be accomplished in several ways. The different types include:
Tell a Friend
This is one of the most common types of viral marketing. Sites that use this technique typicallly ask their users to tell their friends about a merchants products or services. This is also referred to as “pass along” messaging. The risk with this type of marketing is that many email providers tend to label this type of email as “spam”, so it’s important to ensure the “from and “subject” lines don’t contain words that could be labeled as spam.
Incentivised
Companies use a marketing technique where they offer a reward to a user who refers someone to a company. Commonly, this technique is more effective when the referral is required to take action on an offer in order for the reward to be given to the referring user.
Undercover
Undercover marketing, the most difficult to spot, is a viral message in disguise. Usually, this type of marketing is disquised as an unusual site or an usual piece of news without overt outbound linkages.
Buzz
More common in the Entertainment world. The divorce of or the marraige of stars who have movies yet to be released is an example of this type of viral marketing. There’s nothing like heresay or rumor to help create buzz about a upcoming movie, I think.
The most common means of transmission of these types of viral messages is through email. Many people forward different types of messages, such as funny pictures, news, videos and in many cases, end up forwarding viral messages that advertise a particular service or product in doing so.
Another common method of transmitting a viral message is through the use of instant messaging services such as, Yahoo and MSN. Receivers of said messages are much more likely to check out whatever it is due to the trust they have of the sender and the urgency of both the sender and the message.
Article directories are a good source of viral messages now. Many marketers swear by this method because most directories allow for the placement of a link in the resource box of the article. What they do is, write an article about a certain product or service and link back to their site in the resource box. This is considered a great way to advertise a product or service and is also considered viral in nature. This is because said article could be picked up as content by others and published on a great many sites. Of course, the traditional and probably the most effective means of viral marketing is by word of mouth. Let’s face it, you are more likely to purchase a product or service based on a opinion of someone you know.
Even with several methods to accomplish this method of advertising, there are some risks involved. One, as I already discussed is spam. Another is size limitations. Let’s say your viral message is in the form of a video. Now, because video clip files tend to be large, your reach could be short due to file size limitations imposed by email providers. Also, due to the possibility of your recipients not having the correct media format, you run the risk of having recipients not having the correct application to open said video file.
Despite these risks, the power of this technique can dramatically increase your reach in a huge way without the big expense of a traditional marketing campaign. Because of this factor, viral marketing is here to stay and that bodes well for those of us involved in any type of online endeavor.
That’s all I have for today.
On another note, my wife PJ’s new web page is nearing completion and I anticipate it being live at some point next week. At this point, both PJ and I are extremely pleased at how it is turning out and I think you’ll like it as well. So, stay tuned for more developments on that front.
I hope this finds you having a pleasant day/night.
