Everything you need to know about Viral Marketing

Viral marketing, in a purely business sense, is defined as a technique used by a company's marketing team to acquaint their buyers and assert the position of their certain product or service in the market with the use of the word-of-mouth concept.

The entire concept of viral marketing is patterned upon human's natural behavior when it comes to seller-customer interaction. Viral marketers use their innate talent to talk and to encourage their buyers to buy a product.

It is also the process of initiating your customer or client to voluntarily pass his or her knowledge about the product or service to another person.

It's viral marketing when someone else is promoting your product

Now using a much simple explanation, viral marketing is the process of advertising your product or your service through good reviews, impressive feedbacks, and testimonials of a satisfied customer. And you won't be doing the promotion yourself. With viral marketing, the very people who have tried your product or your service are the ones who will be doing all the promotional activities for you. Once a pleased customer talks about their experience with your company to their family and friends, that's viral marketing working in full color for you. The direct result of this strategy is a boost in your sales, a bigger client base, and the privilege to carry the best product or service in the industry.

Types of offline viral marketing techniques

Offline viral marketing techniques usually involve the tri-media – print, television, and radio. Producing a TV commercials and radio plugs is the most common example of viral marketing. The goal of these advertisements is to encourage the buying public's recognition of your products or services. The use of celebrities, experts, and infectious jingles are just an added tactic. Print media is what refers to magazines, newspapers, and other publications. But the billboards, banners, stickers, and streamers of your commodities can be classified under print viral marketing as well.

Viral marketing started from free stuff

Right now, viral marketing is widely used over the internet. Viral marketing is the main strategy of online businesses these days. But the bigger news is that it really works. The use of simple viral marketing techniques such as giving away free stuff over the internet, using digital signatures, bulk email marketing, and web promotion are all examples of viral marketing techniques that could generate massive income, popularity, and online success for you.

Wikipedia - Viral marketing to increase brand awareness

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

Viral marketing spread like virus infection

The term "viral marketing" is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. "Do they have a vaccine for that yet?" you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don't even have to mate -- he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

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

The classic Hotmail.com example of viral marketing

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. 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

Seth Godin - Two kinds of viral marketing

Viral marketing is an idea that spreads--and an idea that while it is spreading actually helps market your business or cause.

Two kinds of viral marketing: The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.

A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that's a marketing campaign that spreads but isn't the product itself. Shepard Fairey's poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument--a visual one--for a candidate.)

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn't market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn't do any marketing at all.

Spread the words

There are different types of viral marketing, all using the same fundamental principles. Pass-along messages encourage users to send them along to others, such as e-mails with instructions to forward at the bottom or humorous video clips. Incentive-driven messages offer rewards in exchange for providing e-mail addresses. Undercover viral marketing presents messages in an unusual page or false news item without any direct incitement to pass it along, in the hopes that word-of-mouth will spread the message. Gossip or buzz marketing seeks to get people talking about something by creating controversy.

Baekdal - 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing

Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it... instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing - and let your fans do all the work for you.

With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own - and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

But how?

There are a lot of tricks to viral marketing. Here are 7 important ones:
1: Make people feel something
2: Do something unexpected
3: Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)
4: Make sequels
5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding´
6: Connect with comments
7: Never restrict access!