Viral Marketing Comes With Its Pros And Cons

As you deal with viral marketing to promote the company there are many things that you need to be aware of. Like anything, there are pros and cons to viral marketing. At times you will see some great things happen, at other times you may not be able to benefit in the right way from viral marketing.

What is viral marketing? Remember the chain letters and things from the 90s? These are still around, just not as much as they used to be. You are basically creating a viral marketing campaign like this, but in an new way that is popular. Emails are great to help you send out timely information and it's easy for the customers to quickly forward on this information to others.

When you like a particular product or service do you find that you want to share it with others? If something is impressive, people usually want to tell everything about it to their friends and family members. This is called word-of-mouth marketing and it's one of the most effective ways to generate attention for the company and to have a low cost. Since you are really working on teaching people about the company, you need to look for the customers that have a lot of contacts. You need these individuals to send out information to their contacts in order to watch the information spread like wildfire.

One of the new technologies that has increased in popularity is to use cell phones to help in getting the message out. By sending out a code or text message, customers have immediate access to the information. This is a great way to help you in getting your company name heard quickly. For a business that is hoping to increase sales by noon, text messages can be huge! You need to be able to really look at the impact that it can have when you are focused on getting sales up in a timely manner.

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can all become great sources to the company. You have a chance to really get your name out there in a hurry. Social media is accessed on a lot of mobile devices as well so you have the chance to get people to respond to you in a timely manner, also helping to boost sales and credibility for the company as you are showing how you compete with other companies even though you are a small business.

The pros to viral marketing:
- It helps to market your small business in new ways. You are able to gain attention to customers that might not have been able to hear about the company otherwise such as having people from other countries learn about your small business.
- It saves you a lot of money! With viral marketing you really rely on the customers to help you market. This way you aren't spending a huge amount of money to advertise and get the company name out there.
- It challenges your marketing team to become creative!

The cons to viral marketing
- It can fail if you don't choose the right customers. You need to pick people that are able to spread the word about the company quickly thanks to their large presence online or their network. If you don't have contacts like this, your campaign may not make it far.
- You have to stay on top of it often. Viral marketing requires daily influence compared to other marketing strategies that just require you to set it up and to let it run.
- It can waste time if it fails!