Viral marketing is one of the most desirable methods of promoting a company on the web, including by building Brand awareness. It is becoming increasingly common for the Internet users themselves to spread information on the products or services offered by a particular company. These news spread like viruses, reaching the potential clients. The viral marketing can therefore be compared to virtual “grapevine”.
What is viral marketing?
Viral marketing is a Strategy where the goal is to present a commercial message to the recipients and to get the recipients involved in copying and spreading it. In other words: viral marketing revolves around creating a message that will be so appealing to the recipient that they will be willing to share this message with others (family, friends, other web users etc.), which means they’ll be “infecting” their surroundings with this message. The important thing here is that the viral marketing is about sharing positive experience related to a particular company or product. The reason it’s important is because consumers are much more willing to share negative opinions on a brand or product than positive ones.
The advantages of viral marketing
Properly utilized viral marketing may bring numerous benefits to a company. The key advantages of viral marketing are:
- The ability to reach a large number of recipients. Because it’s the recipients that spread the message around, the information on the company will be able to reach many people who probably would have never learned about it under different circumstances.
- Evoking positive emotions related to the company. As we have mentioned before, viral marketing in principle consists of spreading good information on the brand or the product, which means that reaching a large number of people will make the world hear the positive opinions on the company.
- Low distribution costs. If a message is created that users will be willing to spread, the company won’t have to bear large costs of distributing the message (the distribution is handled by the recipients themselves).
If our concept wasn’t well thought-out, we may not experience the expected coverage, and the results might be negative – the message not being clear enough might get people involved in searching, for example, even though nobody was lost. As a result, the company might experience an increase of negative reviews and a harmful retention of clients.
The form of viral marketing
Viral marketing might come in form of e-cards, contests, quizzes, videos or simple Web-based games. What actually matters is an unorthodox idea that will cause web users to share the information with other users, who might unwittingly become potential clients. Development and effectiveness of viral marketing can benefit from social media platforms that are commonplace these days.
Conclusion: There’s no denying that viral marketing has plenty of advantages. First and foremost, it should be noted how low the costs are for conducting a campaign of this sort while also maintaining its wide coverage. For a price of around few hundred zloties (on the average) one may get access to dozens, hundreds or even dozens of thousands of Internet users, some of whom will become the company’s customers. Another advantage of a viral company is that its results will remain for a long time afterwards, even when the action has already ended. Which means they contribute to ceaseless increase of a particular brand’s awareness thanks to the clients’ loyalty.
