Viral Marketing: An Introduction

By Phil Johnson

In a thesis from Copenhagen Business School Viral Marketing is said to be relevant for "nearly every type of organisation". It is therefore vital that you understand the concept.

While many consider Viral Marketing (VM) a thing iof the past and dead and buried, VM is very much alive and kicking. Read on and you will discover why you can not ignore this effective marketing technique.

Put simply Viral marketing is a technique that uses word of mouth or email to reach and affect an audience. You have most probably already seen many basic forms of viral marketing without even realising it. This is the basic beauty of the system! Consider the fact that the most common examples of viral marketing are the "Tell A Friend" or "Recommend This To A Friend" forms you see on most websites. Yes many go unused but you will be surprised that the results are excellent. The reason for this is rather obvious, somebody visits the site and enjoys their experience and thinks that one or more of his friends would also enjoy, or find the site useful. The visitor could email their friends but the form makes the process simple.

Once the form has sent the visitors friend an invitation to visit your site and they follow the link you have a visitor who is interested in your product/service rather than a visitor who has landed on your site by chance. Therefore the conversion rate of such visitors should be higher than your usual visitors.

The ultimate goal of viral marketing is to promote your business, idea, service or product over and over until it reaches thousands of people.

Yes, the word "viral" may have negative connotations, viral flu and computer viruses are not very nice! However the reference is to the fact that this form of advertising is contagious and passes from person to person in a positive manner beneficial to your business.

Viral marketing is the creation and distribution of content that gets passed on to others. The challenge is to make the product creative or attractive enough for users to want to bother spreading it around. Viral marketing is simply the latest variant of what used to be referred to as word of mouth and the diffusion of innovation. Viral marketing is a proven concept to attract an audience for any kind of business. The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company.

While viral maketing has been the "BUZZ" word of many marketing consultants for several years it's actual implementation has continually changed and evolved. Many online campaigns have the ultimate goal of building their opt in email lists and brand building and while the advantages of list building can not be ignored it should always be kept in mind that a true viral marketing campaign should be kept extremely easy to share!

Think of the movie "Snakes on a Plane", what an exciting example of well implemented viral marketing. Hardly anyone had seen the film but it was on the lips of virtually everyone on the planet for many weeks prior to the films debut. Starting on the Internet the campaign eventually reached the international medium of television just before it's release - perfect.

About the Author
Phil Johnson is the author of Viral Marketing Advertising .com, a resource on the wide topic of marketing. He also contributes to article sites such as Information Junkie and The A-Z of. Writing mainly about the various aspects of marketing Phil has vast experience of both online and offline methods having over 15 years in the marketing business after a sucessful career as an accountant.

Source: Viral Marketing

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