Viral Marketing: Principles - Tips & Advantages with Example

Viral Marketing: A complete guide

“If the internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will”- George Pendle.

Viral marketing is an incredible process of generating traffic. It has extended to grow beyond a marketing strategy. It is also a brilliant tool for most marketers who depend on the internet to earn a full-time income. It creates an inquisitiveness and a desire among the marketers to generate an immense demand for a product or service that is yet to be released.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Do you know users of Facebook share content 47.5 billion times daily, while users of Twitter have approximately more than 208 followers for each post?

Let’s talk some more about viral marketing.

In this blog I am going to discuss:

Definition of viral marketing
Principles of viral marketing.
Pros and Cons.
Examples
How does viral marketing operate?
How to boost business growth with viral marketing?

Now let’s try to figure out various intricate aspects of viral marketing.

What is Viral Marketing?

It is essential to have a comprehensive idea of the concept of viral marketing before trying to understand the various aspects.

Viral marketing or ‘buzz marketing’ is a technique by use of which numerous websites or users pass on a marketing message to others. It is a way to create an exponential development in the content’s visibility. The users create a scenario that can lead to multi-fold development of the content.

Principles of Viral Marketing

If you are looking forward to creating an innovative and new viral marketing campaign, here are the pivotal principles to make it effective:

Provide an incentive to a user for getting involved: To make any viral marketing campaign work, it is essential to offer something to the users who are sharing. People love free and compelling incentives. The more attractive incentives offered, the more likely people are going to share it. It could be some exclusive content or teasers that compels your target audience to want more.

Make an easy sharing campaign: Viral marketing is popular these days owing to the cheap price that people have to pay to communicate. Digital marketing makes copying easy. Simplify digital format to transfer it easily.

Take advantage of people’s motivation: Wishing to be cool, famous and loved are the pivotal motivations that marketing campaigns thrive on. Design a campaign based on these motivations.

Ensure the scale: It is essential to choose a medium that can promote small as well as massive campaigns.

Take advantage of the availability: Every person has a list of at least 10-12 persons in social media. Broaden the social network to promote campaigns among masses.

Viral Marketing: Pros and Cons

The key to planning and creating the content for a viral marketing campaign is to make it as engaging and relevant as possible. On seeing it, people cannot help but share with friends saying: “Hey, you have got to see this. It’s amazing.”

Campaigning viral content has some brilliant advantages and disadvantages. Let’s have a look.

Pros:

Cheap: Producing something that people will want to share can be done at a cheap price. Often, the simplest ideas create the most stir.
Reach: By creating a viral content one can expand their reach among the audience.
Creativity: In an eagerness to get a wide reach, users use creativity to promote the brands effectively.
Relationships: It facilitates the growth of relationships with several brands, thus helping to develop consumer loyalty. It helps to do repeat business.

Cons:

One cannot control the reaction of the people. If the marketing campaign goes viral in a negative manner, or there are other issues, it can damage the brand.
Waste time: If the campaigns do not reach a targeted audience, it will be a waste of time and resources.
Cause irritation: Viral marketing can turn into a nuisance if the brand message can be found at every nook and corner. Thus, there are chances of an overexposed campaign to be ignored or deleted.
Market nuances effect: Market nuances can change the outcomes of a marketing campaign in the most unpredictable ways possible.

There is every possibility of a viral campaign to be a hit or a miss. If meaningful techniques are implemented accurately, then it can turn out to be a low-cost solution done right.

Examples of Viral marketing:

Let’s try to understand the concept of viral marketing with the help of some examples:

Hotmail: One of the successful classic examples of viral campaigning is Hotmail. Hotmail attracted massive traffic by offering free email to people. They attached a signature at the bottom of each email page to promote their free service. Every user sending email through Hotmail contained a promotional message. It reached like a virus to numerous people. Recipients seeing the ad also signed up for Hotmail.

Dark Knight: The Dark Knight campgn was one of the most widespread campaigns. The campaign included everything from Gotham Cab company websites to a Harvey Dent real-life campaign. The campaign engaged the mass on an altogether different level. It made an incredible amount of money at the box office.

These are some incredible viral marketing campaigns that left a significant mark in the field of marketing.

How does viral marketing operate?

Viral marketing is all about infecting people with campaigns. The operation is a simple one. People look and share marketing messages on the internet and through social media. Therefore, it is necessary to create a marketing campaign which is inspirational as well as easy to share through Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. Let’s have a look at the steps of operation:

Objectives of Viral Marketing and How to Measure the Success:

Let’s focus on the objectives of viral marketing.

Defining clear goals or the sale numbers of the products targeted is creating the marketing objectives. With the help of viral campaigning, brands are able to achieve the following objectives:

Develop brand awareness.
Increase the size of the social community.
Target the audience accurately.
Make engagement strategies strong to increase the loyalty of customers.
Increase the company’s market share.

Now that you know the goals, let’s figure out how to measure the success of the campaign. The effectiveness of a campaign depends upon several factors. You can use the following metrics to measure the success of the campaign:

Organic search traffic.
Referral traffic.
Social traffic.
Direct traffic.
New visitors.
Behaviour flow, and much more.

Create contents that the users will share:

Sharing is a prerequisite step for viral marketing. The significant aspect of going viral is to create content that people actually want to share with others. This step transforms an ordinary and regular topic to a trending and viral topic.

Let’s have a brief look into the steps:

Doing it right: It is essential to think out of the box and make your campaigns humorous or intriguing. For example: The ad of Old Spice is one of the most shared ads.
Evoking emotional content: It is essential to make the content appealing and emotional to force people to relate to the campaign.
Unique and discursive content: Create content that is unique and incredible at the same time. It should spark a discussion among the masses.

How to make it simple to involve users?

The most significant aspect of viral marketing campaigns is to reach out to the mass and involve them in the process as much as possible.

To do this, you can follow the following steps:

Video campaigns: Making of video campaigns is in trend. Making a video and naming it “making of” or “how to do” helps the audience to know about the brand.

It is also one of the effective techniques to make news content viral. For example: Live videos of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Animations: Animations is a craze among all masses irrespective of their ages. It attracts audience simply and visually, allowing the brands to transmit their messages.
Trailers: Using this technique is the most effective to engage the audience and enabling them to pass in the simplest way. Thus, film trailers never fail to cater to the target audience.

Make your content easy to share

Easier the message, greater are the chances of passing it on. Emails of marketing campaigns should include "forward to a friend" links or "send to a friend" can be added in the website pages. Marketers can also make use of social media to pass the campaigning message. For example: you can promote new products or services in the form of a viral video through Youtube.

Be authentic and transparent

It is necessary to make your marketing campaigns authentic and transparent. Marketers who portray things other than their brand value find the attempt blowing up on them.

Let’s figure out some ways to be authentic and transparent:

Portray visible business intelligence through customer complaints on social media.
Review the product through employees before creating the content.
Focus on the values of the product.
Include real people in the campaigns.
Create an emotional connection.

Provide incentive to users for sharing and interacting

The most effective ways to facilitate sharing among users is to offer an incentive. People like to portray themselves as caring, resourceful, and witty. It is essential to design the content that focusses on such values. This will enable the users to share and interact much more with the campaigns. A gift voucher or coupons can be given to every six friends it is shared with. It is essential to remember that the incentives should not cloud the content.

Make the message available to the target audience

An essential part of a viral marketing campaign is to make the message available among the masses. Research the target market and ensure to make the campaigns available online. Use forums and blog comments to appeal to the audience.

Use a strong call of action

Be clear about your call to action to the user like: “Send this to a friend”. Using a strong call of action is essential to promote a viral marketing campaign. Ensure that the medium does not overshadow the content. Take out some time to interact with a potential customer. Use a clear call of action like "Send this video to four people" or "Participate now," etc.

Track, Analyse and Optimise:

It is necessary to track interactions with your consumers. Take out some time to monitor the growth and response rate. Analyse elements that make the campaigns work. TubeMogul and VidMetrix can be used to track and analyse online campaigns.

Now that you know everything about the steps to make viral marketing succeed, let us move on to the next segment.

How to boost business growth with viral marketing?

Taking advantage of the profits of marketing campaigns is essential. You can boost the growth of your business in the following ways:

Increase web capacity to take the load of the additional traffic.
Develop new relationships with various brands.
Draft reports following the instances in future.

Creating and making marketing campaigns can turn out to be as easy as pie if you follow the above guidelines. Summarise understandings, execute guidelines and create a marketing campaign.

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