Viral Marketing

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness , through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic.

It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

The increasing accessibility of the internet into many social networks, and pervasiveness of personal mobile phones, has catalysed the viral marketing phenomenom. Viral marketers use electronic media to stimulate and encourage word-of-mouth or electronic message dissemination between individuals. Since these networks, and the person-to-person communications they enable are so young, viral marketing is a new concept for many traditional marketers.

Viral marketing messages propagates themselves through the emotions and expectations of the virus carriers. It may be the hope of receiving or winning something, or the expectation that virus recipients will find the message humorous, competitive, educational, or entertaining that incent the carrier to pass the message on.

Tuning viral marketing campaigns to these expectations can lead to potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect, with corresponding growth awareness of the brand carrier by the virus.

Challenges for viral marketers

The challenges facing viral marketers include:

How can the viral marketing message be initiated?
How do you maximise brand awareness by fully infecting the target market with the virus?
How to achieve the process without offending a community, and attracting negative perceptions?
What about mutating the virus for subsequent campaigns?

When the challenges are handled professionally the ROII (Return on Internet Investment) can be enormous.

Give us a call on 0800 AIMDATA . We'll show you some great examples of viral marketing campaigns?