What Is Viral Marketing & Does It Actually Work?
According to me Viral Marketingis assume method for promoting your business and brand using the internet. Using viral marketing strategies have the great ability to attract a large number of people who will be your best customers for a long time. It is relatively inexpensive, but sometimes very effective method of business and brand promotion, it requires a lot of creativity.
How does it Work?
Viral Marketing have 3 key elements to a viral marketing campaign.
1. The Incentive
2. Easy Forwarding
3. Design of Message
I define here step by stepÂ
1. The Incentive – This is most successful viral marketing will provide people with an incentive to participate – Ex. A reason to pass on the message to others. The reason for this should be obvious – why should people choose to forward your marketing message to others? You need to give them an incentive to do so. This incentive can take the form of a cash incentive, a ‘free’ product/service that would otherwise have traditional commercial value (e.g. free online ‘disk space’ where people can upload documents(doc, pdf and ppt) and access them over the Internet), or some other form of product/service that would not normally be thought of as having value (e.g. a humorous message).
The main point here that an incentive can take many forms – the exact choice of the incentive depends on your goals, resources and audience.
2. Easy Forwarding – The Internet is the ultimate for of viral marketing because of the easy and low cost of someone forwarding your marketing content/message to other.
3. Design of Message & Incentive – In order for a viral marketing email to be successful the design of the Message and Incentive are also critical. The ‘idea’ of an incentive may be perfect (e.g. ‘We’ll give people free advice on how to behave in job interviews’) but if your viral campaign does not communicate the incentive, and its benefits, effectively enough, you may as well not have bothered. An ineffectively communicated incentive is no incentive at all.
