Viral Marketing - Marketing

Viral Marketing- tales of successful online viral marketing campaigns and some tips for creative viral marketing for your online business.

With popup ads, sponsored search links, and spam in the inbox, consumers are understandably desensitized to traditional advertising and marketing ventures. Viral marketing is a brilliant way to keep your marketing costs down and your return high. Viral marketing means you spend less money on traditional marketing routes and more energy conjuring up creative ways to rely on the consumer to help spread the word about your product or service.

According to Wikipedia, viral marketing refers to, "marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses." Essentially viral marketing taps into the psyche of the consumer and quite cleverly pretends to reposition control from the advertiser to the consumer, unbeknownst to the consumer. The consumer feels they have the power over the product rather than the usual protocol, where people feel bombarded by advertising and feel pressured into buying a product. The consumer becomes part of the marketing campaign by passing along information to others. Viral marketing is more passive when compared to traditional advertising techniques because the consumer is fed information from another consumer and not from the higher powers that be. Feeling included in this way brings the customer closer to the product and produces a more engaged and committed purchaser.

Remember, less can often yield more. Sometimes a vague ad campaign will get consumers talking more than an overt one. A couple of years ago, Peerflix, a peer-to-peer network for movies, launched a successful viral marketing campaign. The hook- they created an online game that made fun of celebrities. Players were photographers that have to take pictures of celebrities, paparazzi style. Perrflix was able to attract almost two million unique visitors to the game, 5% of which they converted to users on their general site. They received media attention for the game from Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com. The game related to their brand in theme and was fun, hence a great draw for potential customers.

The idea behind viral marketing is to create a buzz with a catchy campaign idea and then sit back and watch as word spreads. If you're successful, you won't even have to pay for network commercial time because the news outlets, radio stations, blogs, and others will be talking about it on their own. Talk about affordable advertising!

Warner Brothers launched a successful online viral marketing campaign for their movie, The Dark Knight. They coded only a single graphic on the homepage with no information. The graphic then linked to another page with nothing but another graphic. Clicking on that image took visitors to yet another image where they were promised access to more information by signing up and entering their email address. Once they registered to the site they received an email with a code. When entered, the code removed one single pixel from the solid graphic. Only one pixel can be removed per user so the incentive was to get as many others to sign up as possible so collectively they could reveal the full breadth of information beneath the image. This was a great, inventive way to get people to spread the word about the movie and keep users engaged. Warner Brothers was able to attract interested visitors without having to reach out to them directly.

There are viral agencies devoted specifically to helping your online business and plenty of ideas out there that can be adapted for your use. Mostly, though, it takes a combination of creative thinking, knowing your demographic, and offering up something that provides just enough information so that your potential customers will want to know more and pass it on to others. Spread the word!