A quick look at viral marketing and how to do it effectively

Before you can do viral marketing effectively you have to have a good understanding of what viral marketing is, and the driving force behind it.

The accepted definition of viral marketing is as follows:

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

So, what this means is that you want your message to spread like a virus. Simple concept, hard to master technique. So, with viral marketing, you can have your message delivered by word-of-mouth, or by the networking effects that occur on the Internet.

Viral marketing is a great phenomenon that basically means that others do your marketing work for you. It encourages people to pass along the marketing message you send voluntarily. So, to do viral marketing effectively you want to create something, a message, a video, etc. that people will want to pass along on their own. Most viral promotions take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even SMS text messages.

The concept that started this effective marketing process is that of satisfied customers tell three people, and they become satisfied customers, which means, you get more business by making someone happy. But guess what? Viral marketing can work against you as well. Most people will tell eleven people when they don't like something. So, your goal is to get them to like you, but so much that they produce the effect that they do not like you. So, for effective viral marketing you will want to try and play up the natural human behavior, and benefit from it.

The key is that people pass along your message voluntarily, so it is sort of a stealthy marketing campaign because people do not realize that they are helping you advertise, they see it as a fun thing to pass along, or an interesting fact to share.

Look at what you are trying to sell, and then come up with a good way to get people talking about it. A good example for a veterinarian would be to pass along a hilarious movie clip of a monkey getting sick and falling out of a tree. Then at the end they can say something like, "No matter what kind of animal you have, we can meet your needs." It takes two seconds at the end of a funny video. This video is going to get passed along by email because people like to share things that make them laugh. Now, had you just sent out a text email that says the same thing, no one would pass it on. Get the concept?

There are programs you can buy to aid you in your viral marketing, but the best thing you can do is simply test it out. See if people talk about it, and if not, move to something else. You can test it easily by showing your clip, or your ad, or whatever it is, to your staff. Judge their reaction. If they immediately laugh and start saying, "I've gotta show that to." then it will probably work. If they say, "hmm," then chances are it will not work out for you.

There are a lot of classes and courses that are taught on how to be effective with viral marketing, and it is up to you to take advantage of the experts in their field, because if you get it down, and you can make it work for you, it is going to be the most effective, and cheapest way to advertise.

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