What
is Viral Marketing?
The Six Simple Principles of Viral
Marketing
I admit it. The term "viral
marketing" is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people
will take two steps back. I would. "Do they have a vaccine for that
yet?" you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught
with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether
genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.
But you have to admire the virus. He has
a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer
weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources
to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows
exponentially. A virus don't even have to mate -- he just replicates,
again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each
iteration:
1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
In a few short
generations, a virus population can explode.
Viral Marketing Defined
What does a virus have to do with
marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages
individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the
potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and
influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid
multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.
Off the Internet, viral marketing has
been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a
buzz," "leveraging the media," "network
marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called
"viral marketing." While others smarter than I have attempted
to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term
"viral marketing" has stuck.
Viral Marketing The Classic Hotmail.com Example
The classic example of viral marketing is
Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The
strategy is simple:
Give away free e-mail addresses and
services, Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent
out: "Get your private, free email at Hotmail.com" and,
Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and
associates, Who see the message,
Sign up for their own free e-mail service,
and then Propel the message still
wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from
a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral
marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.
Viral Marketing Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy
Accept this fact. Some viral marketing
strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple
Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to
include in your strategy.
A viral marketing strategy need not
contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more
powerful the results are likely to be.
An effective viral marketing strategy:
1. Gives away products or
services.
2. Provides for
effortless transfer to others.
3. Scales easily from
small to very large.
4. Exploits common
motivations and behaviors.
5. Utilizes existing
communication networks.
6. Takes advantage of
others' resources.
Let's examine at each of these elements
briefly.
1. Viral Marketing Gives away valuable products or
services
"Free" is the most powerful
word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away
valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail
services, free information, free "cool" buttons, free software
programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in
the "pro" version.
The Second Law of Web Marketing is
"The Law of Giving and Selling"
"Cheap" or
"inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but
"free" will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers
practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow,
but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free,
they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their
lives" (with apologies to "Casablanca"). Patience, my
friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable
things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring
valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales
opportunities. Give away something, sell something.
2. Viral Marketing Provides for effortless transfer to
others
Public health nurses offer sage advice at
flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and
don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're
easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be
easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software
download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant
communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make
copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your
marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without
degradation. Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private,
free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling,
compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.
3. Viral Marketing Scales easily from small to very
large
To spread like wildfire the transmission
method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness
of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own
mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly
successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth
will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host
before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned
ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you're okay. You must
build in scalability to your viral model.
4. Viral Marketing Exploits common motivations and
behaviors
Clever viral marketing plans take
advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated "Netscape
Now" buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool.
Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and
understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of
websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy
that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission,
and you have a winner.
5. Viral Marketing Utilizes existing communication
networks
Most people are social. Nerdy,
basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception.
Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12
people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A
person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands
of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for
example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given
week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human
networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker
networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of
relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website
URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail
lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between
people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.
6. Viral Marketing Takes advantage of others'
resources
The most creative viral marketing plans
use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for
example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors who
give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others'
webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and
form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now
someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message.
Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.
For additional information click on FREE
REPORT and fill out our online application.
Heather Garcia
|
