Introduction to Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is the technique to get to the mind and thoughts of the consumer in the minimum possible time with the highest amount of popularity gain, through a self-replicating process like of a viral disease. Marketing is the most crucial process of presenting a newly introduced product into the market for consumers, where people have a choice in the same class of products.
In current digital scenario, most of the software development companies are aiming at marketing their product or service through digital media like textual, audio, video formats or in general, any format that a viewer finds pleasing to the eye and interesting to interact with. Viral marketing focuses at using pre-existing social networks to allow the circulation of the information with the help of digital media like audio, video or any animation that emphasizes the user to view the content of the advertisement at least once. If the content of the message is carefully drafted than the user could find it interesting and fun to read, watch or listen, depending upon the medium. In this way, viral marketing is triggered and reaching the audience is done automatically through the multiplication effect of social sharing.
A brand uploads a video of it’s product on their page on various social media sites like Facebook or Google+. The users view the video and if they find it interesting they either like it or sometimes share it with their network of friends, family and co-workers. This creates a chain reaction that continues on its own. Just through a simple spark of uploading, the video is transmitted all over the networking site, giving popularity to the product which grows exponentially.
Viral marketing works well, when the correct information is provided or marketed to the correct person, in a correct environment through the correct messenger.If any of the parameter unbalances, the output of the strategy or plan fades out as there should be a correct balance of each weight to hold it into the space.
A number of techniques are there that helps turning a marketing campaign to a viral campaign:
- Incentive to view: The users need some incentive to view your content. You can hold a competition, provide some early bird gifts, etc.
- Social media involvement: The most crucial technique of promoting a product. Establishing a name for your brand in social media by using it as a marketing tool is the key.
- Digital media: Nothing better than catching the eye of the user through an interesting video. Upload it and sit back. If it is be something the user wants to see, it will automatically be promoted.
- Target audience involvement: If the audience can feel the subject or any activity, they will want others to keep up with them too. For example, polling.
The most famous example of viral marketing was the promotion of Microsoft’s free e-mail system Hotmail.com, which is a free e-mail storage and access provider. To advertise it’s presence over the web, Microsoft scripted a simple compact message at the end of the every free e-mail a user sends that says, “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com“. This message was sent by many users, many times to many people with every e-mail a user sends, providing correct and relevant information to the receiver, asking them to register, making Hotmail, today’s most popular and widely used free e-mail service over the globe.
Internet is flooded with such examples, where even software development have made use of viral marketing techniques to promote their product over the web in order to increase the traffic onto their website or to increase the popularity of their brand. But, every time a strategy succeeds, the main reason behind that promotion and branding success is the correct and compact information about the product which is provided to the correct user through an appropriate medium.
Since it’s only human to avoid reading long paragraphs describing the details of a product, no one would want to glue himself for a session to understand the granularities of a product.
The user either wants to be awestruck with some information or they want to see something cool and fun. Due to this reason, the main concern to turn any promotional activity into viral marketing is to make the message as interesting and short as possible, so as to attract as many viewers.
Tags: smo, social media, software development companies, viral marketing
Our Team Lead from Q3 was in Chicago with AMB this week. We have been involved in many demonstrations and meetings with customers and partners including Microsoft. We have been asking a lot of the Q3 AMB Team and they have surpassed my expectations on deliverables and efforts to deliver new features and functions, such as the new Address Correction, Cross Database, the e-commerce website, new data sources, testing - this product is near impossible to break, and more. These have been important for all of our prospects, customers and business partnerships.