What Is Viral Marketing?

The goal of viral marketing is to inspire individuals to share a marketing message with friends, family, and other individuals to create expo🧔nential growth in the number of its recipients. Viral marketing seeks to spread information about a product or service from person to person by word of mouth or via the Internet.

Understanding Viral Marketing

In the case of viral marketing, "viral" refers to something that spreads quickly and widely across its audience. Viral marketing is a deliberate enterprise, though the distribution of a message happens organically. As such, social media provides the perfect ecosystem for viral marketing, though it has its roots in traditional 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:word-of-mouth marketing.

While the practice was much more widely used in the early to mid-2000s, it is still common among Internet-based 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. The widespread adoption of social media networks—inc✅luding YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Snapchat, and Faceb🍌ook—has enabled modern viral marketing efforts and increased their efficacy. 

Examples of Viral Marketing

A frequently used example of early viral marketing is Hotmail, the free web-based email service launched in 1996 that included in its users' outgoing messages an embedded advertisement and direct link inviting recipients to sign up for an account. This practice led to the fastest growth among user-based media companies at the time. 

Another example that illustrates how varied viral marketing can be is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The ice bucket challenge existed before The ALS Association utilized it to raise awareness and generate donations; however, the massive dissemination on 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:social media of ALꦿS Ice Bucket videos created a worldwide sensation that tremendously increa༒sed ALS awareness.

What Are the Characteristics ♛of Viral Marketing?

All viral marketing examples—deliberate or accidental—have t💫hree things in common: the message, messenger, and environment. Each part m🧔ust be leveraged to create a successful viral marketing campaign. Viral marketing campaigns may be created by any size of business and can stand alone or be a part of a larger traditional campaign.

These campaigns may use several tools (e.g., videos, games, images, email, text messaging, and free products) to appeal to the emotions of 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:users or viewers, raise awareness of a worthy cause, and make it easier to consume and share. Viral marketing often relies on the help of an influencer, who has a large network of foll♕owers.

With the help of 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:social networks as a "force multiplier," viral marketing is quicker than traditional marketing campaignsꦏ, as well as less expensive. Since it can receive so much traffic in a short time, it can also lead to mainstream media attention. Social media can also cause viral marketing efforts to misfire, as messages are altered, misconstrued, considered spam, or called out for missing the mark. Viral marketing success can also be hard to measure.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Viral Marketing

Advantages

Viral marketing allows companies to better market their products by reaching consumers that ordinarily would not be targeted by its traditional 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:marketing campaigns. This expanded reach allows the company to enter new markets and potentially e☂xpand its customer base.

When done creatively, companies can trigger viral responses. For example, Burger King created a buzz when it posted pictures of its month-old, moldy Whopper in response to McDonald's claim that its burgers don't decompose. Burger King asserts that it uses only fresh ingredients and no preservatives, which should provide a better and healthier outcome for its customers. Its unappealing-looking burger was visible proof of that claim.

Typically, viral marketing costs are a fraction of traditional advertising campaigns. In this way, advertising is essentially free when consumers infectiously share their positive experiences with a company's products and services with others.

Because the Internet allows content to be shared easily and quickly, viral marketing can also trigger exponential and rapid growth; however, it is important to note that how quickly and easily content is shared is♋ largely dependent on whether the company🤪 uses the right tools that make this possible.

Disadvantages

Sometimes, viral marketing sparks a response counter to what was intended. 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Consumers tend to share negative news more often than positive news, and studies show that people have a stronger emotional response to negative news. Negative buzz can be detrimental to business and sometimes hard to recover from.

The effects of viral marketing are hard to measure as it is difficult to determine if a lead or sale resulted from it. And ther✃e is no consensus among businesses on how♑ to measure its success.

If customers believe the viral campaign will compromise their privacy and security, they will likely not share. As a result, the company's marketing mission fails, and its reputation may be tarnished. Future viral marketing campaigns may be adversely affected by previous unsuccessful attempts.

The Bottom Line

Viral marketing is an inexpensive and effective technique for increasing awareness and promoting a brand or product. Companies depend on their audience or targeted users to share advertising campaigns and their positive experiences with others. Successful campaigns can help the company grow, enter new markets, and increase revenues. Companies must choose the right platforms to advertise and format their content to where it can be easily shared. If done poorly, it can produce unfavorable results that could erode earnings and tarnish a company's reputation.