Viral Marketing- An Understanding About ''How To Explode Marketing Virus''

‘’Viral Marketing is an ideavirus in which the carrier of the virus is the product’’

-S. Godin, Author

Viral marketing campaigns are an amazing way to generate a huge amount of buzz and brand awareness whether they are carried out online or offline. A virus doesn’t even have to mate. It just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration.

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In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.”

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services;
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others;
3. Scales easily from small to very large;
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors;
5. Utilizes existing communication networks;
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources.

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives Away Valuable Products or Services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free email services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling”. “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca”). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable email addresses, advertising revenue, and ecommerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for Effortless Transfer to Others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: Stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: email, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication is easy and inexpensive. The digital format makes copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free email message.

3. Scales Easily from Small to Very Large

To spread like wildfire, the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free email service requires its own mail servers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mail servers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mail servers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits Common Motivations and Behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of email messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes Existing Communication Networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science graduate students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in his or her network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon his or her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect email addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission email lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes Advantage of Others’ Resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Examples Of Viral Marketing:

-Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold (Nike)

Watch as Ronaldinho takes delivery of a new pair of boots and spends over two minutes demonstrating the most amazing football skills the internet has ever seen.

23.5 million people have watched this ad on YouTube. Pure genius.

-In 2006, shortly before Christmas, Threshers leaked a voucher worth 40% off wine and champagne via the internet. Apparently the voucher was only intended for suppliers and the belief that Threshers had mistakenly released the voucher made it spread faster and faster around the world via email, social networks and blogs.

Threshers pretended to be worried about losing money on the promotion but no doubt ended up making a huge profit and getting publicity in a month than they got for the whole year.

“It was never intended to get this big,” a company spokesperson said.

The company admits it is slightly concerned about the popularity of the offer.

“We are waiting with bated breath… Early next week, we should get the figures for what level of business we have seen this week and over the weekend,” the spokesperson added.

“This is a better offer than normal and it could end up hitting our profit margins.”

-Gorilla Advert (Cadbury’s)

Another recent example of how an amazing advert can get millions more views thanks to the web comes in the form of a gorilla playing the drums for Cadbury’s.

Absolutely fantastic.

-Hotmail

In todays era of social networking it’s easy to think how quickly the likes of Facebook and Myspace grew but the real viral marketing pioneer was Hotmail.

In December 1996 Hotmail had 500,000 registered users – less than a year later they had over 12,000,000 users. This astonishing growth rate was down to the fact that every single email sent from Hotmail included a small advert promoting the service in the footer.

When Hotmail came into the email niche, there were already players and the list was growing. The challenge for Hotmail was to sign up as many users at the shortest possible time. How will they do it? They used a viral marketing technique called tagline insertion. The tagline says “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” It was strategically placed at the bottom of every e-mail sent out by Hotmail users. Every outbound message still conveyed an advertisement and a subtle implied endorsement by the sender - the recipient knew that the sender was a Hotmail user, and that this new free email thing seemed to work for them. Each new user becomes a company salesperson, and the message spreads organically. 

The viral marketing resulted in 12 million users in just 18 months. It was the fastest growth during the years 1996-1997 of a user based media company. Later on Hotmail reached 66 million users and was having 270,000 new accounts daily. Viral marketing is word of mouth marketing and it works.

-Paint your url on a streaker

In 2002 Vodafone paid a New Zealand rugby fan to run onto the pitch during an All Blacks vs Australia game wearing nothing but the Vodafone logo. Thanks to Tim from SEO Agencies for the tip about this one.

The streaker was fined £30,000 and Vodafone were more than happy to pay it in return for publicity in almost every newspaper across the world.

If you can find somebody willing to streak at a major public event the press coverage is likely to far outweigh any fines levied, especially for large companies with multi million pound marketing budgets. Recently television networks have been reluctant to give coverage to streakers so this tactic may not be as effective in 2008.

-Honda Pintermission

Pinterest is a great platform to find new crafts, exercise routines, life hacks, and general inspiration to do something really fun and different with your life. Unfortunately, some people spend so much time on Pinterest, they never realize any of their pinned aspirations.

Honda set out to change that by offering Pinterest users $500 to pursue their goals. This campaign stood out to me because in addition to being a great piece of marketing, it also produced a fantastic content series. And in a place like the Internet, where good content is king, adding that aspect to any marketing is a big win.

-Dumb Ways to Die

Marketing something... I'll just go ahead and say it, boring, like public transportation safety, can be very challenging. Reminiscent of The Itchy & Scratchy Show from The Simpsons, this public service announcement campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia became a viral sensation.

Why was it so successful? Well, it's cute, catchy, and violent – three factors that always get people's attention.

-KLM Surprise

In a fantastic example of a surprise-and-delight style campaign, Royal Dutch Airlines used Foursquare checkins and Twitter to identify passengers waiting for their flights. Then KLM representatives stalkedscanned the passengers' profiles to find out more about them and presented them with thoughtful gifts.

The act itself would have been fine, but having a camera crew around with them while they did it was a crucial piece of the promotion. This example shows that not only do you have to use effective marketing to appeal to your consumer, you also have to market your marketing.

-Paranormal Activity

Five years later and I'm still amazed that a small independent movie with a $15,000 production budget was able to become one of the most profitable movies of all time. Its success was due in no small part to a fantastic viral marketing campaign.

The movie was initially released to a small number of cities; however, after the goose-bump inducing trailer, a call to action appeared prompting fans to "demand" the movie play in their city.

Through a partnership with Eventful, Paramount created a petition system. If a city reached a certain number of people demanding the movie, it would play in that city.

If there's anything that piques people's interest, it's not having access to something.