Viral Marketing: How To Master It

 Table of Contents

• Introduction 

• Concept of Viral Marketing

• Types of Viral Marketing 

• Significant examples of Viral Marketing 

• Where to start with Viral Marketing

• Viral Marketing in 2020-21

• Conclusion

In April of 2013, Unilever and its ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Brazil released the "Dove Real Beauty Sketches" campaign to empower women about how they look depicting an FBI-trained sketch artist Gil Zamora sketching two illustrations of women based on the explanation given by them and then another on how they were observed by strangers. When the portraits were placed side-by-side, many notable distinctions could be seen between them. The stranger’s description was more attractive than that of the self-description, conveying that, “You are more beautiful than you think.” 

How do you think they were able to create awe in the customers? Viral Marketing is the answer. Let us read more about this type of marketing strategy. 

Concept of Viral Marketing 

Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy that attempts to spread a product or service from person to person by word-of-mouth or sharing via the internet or social media in the form of memes, shares, likes, forwards etc. As the name itself clarifies how consumers circulate information about a product with other people, much in the same way that a virus mutates from one person to another. 

Viral Marketing is to inspire individuals to share a marketing message to friends, family & other individuals to create exponential growth in the number of its recipients. It generates interest in a brand or product through messages that spread quickly from person to person. The basic theory is that users choose to share the content. 

The concept is often misused or misunderstood as people apply it to any successful enough story without taking into account the word 'viral'.

Advantages of Viral Marketing

Here are some of the advantages of viral marketing: 

1) Lower Cost: Viral Marketing doesn't require much cost and can be developed with minimal cost but there must be easy ideas & proper planning.

2) Reach: It gives a wider reach as people willingly share the content themselves, spreading it at an increasing rate. 

3) Credibility: By sharing a brand on social media ensures an untouched audience regarding the credibility of your product, generating interest among the consumers. 

Disadvantages of Viral Marketing 

Following are the disadvantages of viral marketing that a marketer must keep in mind:

1) Nuisance: Receiving similar messages every day exposes the audience to E-Traffic further creating unnecessary internet noise and the messages are likely to be deleted or remain unread. 

2) Hard To Measure: It is very difficult to measure the worthwhile proposition, so it became quite hectic for managers to analyze the effectiveness of internet marketing campaigns. 

3) Negative Word of Mouth: Sometimes a negative review is enough to hide 100 positive ones, spreading negative buzz.

Types of viral marketing

Source (in the picture) 

There are various types of viral marketing that, if applied correctly, yield results greater than expected.

1) Teaser: A teaser campaign, also known as a pre-launch campaign, is an advertising gimmick involving a few snippets and cryptic messages for anticipation of a larger campaign. These advertisements are called "teasers" or "teaser ads".

2) Word of mouth - Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM, WOM marketing, also called word of mouth advertising) is actively influenced or encouraged by organizations (e.g. 'seeding' a message in networks rewarding regular consumers to engage in WOM, employing WOM 'agents').

3) Emotional: Emotional marketing is the intentional use of persuasive emotional messages to form a deep connection with the audience toward achieving the desired result. Often, it appeals to a single emotion only.

4) Humour: To make the campaign more impactful and memorable for the audience, humour is used as a tried and tested strategy in marketing the brands.

5) Incentivized: Incentivized advertising is a new ad format that is gaining popularity in digital mobile advertising where the publisher rewards users for watching an ad. An endemic issue here is adverse selection, where reward-seeking users select into incentivized ad placements to obtain rewards.

Significant Examples of Viral Marketing 

Just like Dove, many companies have been able to gain attention through viral marketing by creating unique videos on YouTube, which are then sharing them on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter etc.

Here are significant examples of Viral Marketing:- 

1) HotMail: In 1996, HotMail was one of the first businesses to become extremely successful by utilising viral marketing techniques by inserting the tagline "Get your free email at HotMail," at the bottom of every email sent out by its users. Hotmail was able to sign up 12 M users in 18 months. At that time, this was the fastest growth by a user based media company. The company now establishes 270,000 new accounts each day. 

2) ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: In 2014, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was among the most viral marketing challenges in the social networks for creating the awareness of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's Disease. The challenge was to pour a bucket of ice water over their heads & nominate other friends. Over 2.4 million on Facebook & about 3.7 million on Instagram, huge celebrities & entrepreneurs like Justin Bieber, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates etc. participated in this challenge.

3) Zoom Virtual Background Challenge: Zoom had introduced a monthly competition for remote workers who could share videos or pictures using zoom’s virtual background feature. A monthly competition with three prizes per month was promoted and this increased its popularity during the COVID pandemic. 

4) Burger King: Burger King has used several marketing campaigns. Its "The Subservient Chicken" campaign, running from 2004 until 2007, was an example of viral or word-of-mouth marketing.

Where to start with viral marketing? 

With the following steps, one can master viral marketing. 

Step #1: Prepare for Growth

A marketer must be ready for explosive growth and visitors to the website and checking web hosting account that can handle a high volume of traffic and that merch accounts are ready for a sudden spike in sales, can assure a smooth transition.

Step #2: Capturing Contact 

Having an objective before spreading the message can help collect emails which is a much more effective means of viral marketing than making sales is. After collecting the emails, marketers have the opportunity to market to them and build a relationship for converting them from email subscribers into paying customers.

Step #3: A Message With a Free Offer

After having an objective for attracting new prospects, a marketer of a firm needs to offer something in exchange for capturing people’s email or contact information. A good approach is giving away something free right away and offering valuable content in the form of follow-up emails.  

Step #4: Offer an Incentive for Spreading the Word

This is where the power of viral marketing really shines. There is a need for a program that automatically emails the offer to the friends and which is set up to reward the person for inviting people. By having an incentive to your customers who are doing the inviting AND to the new invitees, there will be a powerful viral marketing machine in hand that will run with little or no intervention. 

Step #5: Deliver The Message with Multiple Forms of Media

Now, it's time to start attracting traffic to the offer page and a great way to do this is with multiple forms of media such as videos, articles, press releases, and podcasts. After this is complete, the next step would be to immediately make another offer to the new subscriber in return for them inviting friends to take advantage of your free opt-in offer.

Step #6: Explode The Viral Marketing Campaign With a Contest

Offer a great prize to the subscriber who invites the most people. Don’t be afraid to invest in this prize, because the better it is the more effective your viral marketing campaign will be. It might also be a good idea to offer a prize for those who invite the second and third most people.

Viral Marketing in 2020-21

As said earlier, viral marketing is like coronavirus, you think it’s just the small flu but before long, it spreads everywhere and conquers the world. The only difference is that people would love to experience viral marketing, unlike the COVID-19.

With new brands opening daily, all of them have the same motive in today’s scenario, to go viral. Everyone wants their posts to spread like wildfire and reach as many customers as possible through the medium of social media. 

The types of content that will go viral in 2021-2022

1) Puzzles and Riddles: Everybody loves a challenge that keeps them engaged and that’s why they love brain teasers and riddles. Social media has given brands a platform to challenge and reach their audience in a fun way. 

2) Infographics: Minimalism is a concept loved by all. Infographics play a very important role in minimising the use of words and still providing l content that is educational, entertaining and concise at the same time. 

3) Motivational Content: Sometimes there is just a need for extra motivation from someone to pass the day. Content that is providing positivity, quotes of famous people, etc keeps the audience motivated and positive which in return gives visibility to the company. 

4) Personality Quizzes: Questions like “Which Friends character are you?” or “What city should you live in?” create a generous amount of buzz between the people and it's a fun way to engage with the brand.

5) How-To: Creating content that is providing a solution for problems that users might have could help the brand to gain superior organic reach and it could provide a better chance of appearing at the top in SEO results. 

Conclusion

Until some time ago going viral may seem like a dream but the social media platforms and their influences have made this idea & dream a reality now. These opportunities have also brought some challenges with them, in the past, these platforms didn't monitor the content closely but now the content is measured on a variety of elements and you have to perform well in all these to stand out. If your content is unique and is offering some value to the users then not only you can go viral but also create a long relationship with your audience.