What is Viral Marketing?

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 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."

The strategy may also include video clips, interactive forums, newsletters, ebooks and images accompanied by dedicated test messages.


Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

A viral marketing strategy including 6 elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral mareting 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 advantages of others' resources

Sources:

The Six Simple Principle of Viral Marketing by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

Advantages of Viral Marketing

The word-of-mouth concept ripples on to peer-to-peer recommendation of the product or service. It also enables the business to generate revenue from local interest in the venture. In McDonald case, most of the web banners posted on the popular website like yahoo, msn, tvb.com and some popular games websites. It can create peer-to-peer recommendation and impression of McDonald 24 hours delivery service.

To promote more businesss transactions of McDonald 24 hours delivery service, it can create high credibility, high efficiency, low cost throughout viral marketing. Such as McDonald receiving the unparallel attention of the massive crowd at a relatively low cost throughout Internet advertisements like web banners, pop-up ads.

And it is probably a way more effective way to create brand awareness and to get the world out to consumers.

What is Viral Marketing?

"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."

I am using a simple example to explain how viral marketing works effectively.

Consider when you check your email, you see a mail from a friend which is a buy one get one free e-coupon offered by Levi's, you will always open it because of your trusting relationship with your friend. When you choose to forward this message to the other friends, you have already endorsed it and given credibility to Levi's product.

In this way, you become a brand advocate every time you transfer the message to others and the others will do the same to his own social network. Like viruses, the message will be replicated rapidly and reached thousands of people.


Key Points:
1.Viral marketing is a new way to reach your target audience.
2.For viral marketing to work, you must understand what will motivate your target audience to pass on a message to someone with similar interests.
3.Viral marketing is word-of-mouth marketing via a digital platform that can spread exponentially.

Source:"The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing" by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Source:"Viral Marketing:Get your audience to do your marketing for you" by Russell Goldsmith

Advantages and Disadvantage of Viral Marketing

Taking the example of IKEA Facebook Showroom, the main advantage of using Facebook to create viral marketing buzz is that its message can reach a larger number of Facebook users within seconds in a cost-effective way.

The vital of successful viral marketing is that message are forwarded on to friends, family and social group who know the sender. Unlike junk mail, the receivers are happy to receive and forward any message among their friends. The positive word-of-mouth will allows marketers to tap into the community’s existing networks and spread not only the marketing message but also increase their purchase intention.

The main disadvantage of viral marketing on this case is that IKEA limited their marketing communications within the social networks of Facebook only. I believe some of their target audience or brand loyalists are not in the Facebook networks yet, they definitely miss out the opportunities to reach them.

The other problem is that IKEA cannot control the users’ comment posted at the Facebook, it can be either positive appraisal or negative sentiment about their company.

Source: http://09832994s.blogspot.com

What is Viral Marketing

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.

The goal of a viral marketer is to create "buzz" about a product or idea, so that the idea spreads widely. If effective, viral marketing may require very little effort on the part of the propagandist, as the recipients of the message become the primary agents who spread it to other people. Initially viral marketers identify individuals with high social networking potential and create viral messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed

Key points
1) Viral marketing is a word-of-mouth marketing but in digitally
2) Effortless to transfer to others people
3) Scales easily from small to very large

Source: The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing by Dr. Ralph F Wilson, E-commerce consultant, Web Marketing Today, Febraury 1, 2005http://www.viralmarketingwiki.com/