Viral Marketing
What is Viral Marketing?
The principle behind Viral Marketing is that it encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others. The advantage of getting individuals to pass on a marketing messiage is the these people become your marketing team and do it for free.
How does it work?
1. The incentive: the mose successful viral marketing will provide people with an incentive to participate- i.e. a reason to pass on the messafe to others. The reason for this is why should people choose to forward your marketing message to others? you need to give them an incentive to do so This incentive can take the form of cash incentive, a 'free' product/service that would otherwise have taditional commercial value(e.g. free online 'disk space' where people cam upload documents and access them over the internet), or some other form of pruct/service that would not normally be thought of as having value(e.g. a humorous message).
2. Easy Forwarding: The internet is the ultimate for of Viral marketing because of the ease and low cost of someone forwarding you marketing message.
3.Design of message and incentive: In oder of a viral marketing email to be successful the design of the message and incentive are also critical. the 'idea' of an incentive may be perfect ( e.g. 'we'll give peope free advice on how to behave in job interviews') but if your viral campaign does not communicate the incentive, and its benefits, effectively enough, you may as well not have bothered. An ineffectively communicatedincentive is no incentive at all. The main rules in such communication are that the message should be:
- clear
- concise