Viral Marketing

Viral marketing seeks to spread information about a product or service from person to person by word of mouth or sharing via the internet or email. The goal of viral marketing is to inspire individuals to share a marketing message to friends, family, and other individuals to create exponential growth in the number of its recipients.

Viral marketing or viral advertising is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product to other people, much in the same way that a virus spreads from one person to another. It can be delivered by word of mouth or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet and mobile networks. The concept is often misused or misunderstood, as people apply it to any successful enough story without taking into account the word “viral”.

Viral advertising is personal and, while coming from an identified sponsor, it does not mean businesses pay for its distribution.^[rx] Most of the well-known viral ads circulating online are ads paid by a sponsor company, launched either on their platform (company web page or social media profile) or social media websites such as YouTube. Consumers receive the page link from a social media network or copy the entire ad from a website and pass it along through e-mail or posting it on a blog, web page, or social media profile. Viral marketing may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, text messages, email messages, or web pages. The most commonly utilized transmission vehicles for viral messages include pass-along-based, incentive-based, trendy-based, and undercover based. However, the creative nature of viral marketing enables an “endless amount of potential forms and vehicles the messages can utilize for transmission”, including mobile devices.

Understanding Viral Marketing

In the case of viral marketing, “viral” refers to something that spreads quickly and widely across its audience. Viral marketing is a deliberate enterprise, though the distribution of a message happens organically. As such, social media provides the perfect ecosystem for viral marketing, though it has its roots in traditional word-of-mouth marketing.

While the practice was much more widely used in the early to mid-2000s, as new internet businesses were being created in extreme numbers, it is still common among internet-based business-to-consumer (B-to-C) companies. The widespread adoption of social media networks—including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook—has enabled modern viral marketing efforts and increased their efficacy.

What makes things go viral

According to the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On,^[rx] six key factors drive virality.^[rx] They are organized in an acronym called STEPPS which stands for

• Social Currency – If sharing a piece of content makes a user look good to their audience, they will be more likely to share it. Users can derive social currency from their association with your brand or with the content itself or its messaging.
• Triggers – Social currency gets people talking about your viral content, triggers keep them talking about it. A trigger is any kind of stimulus that invokes or connects thoughts and ideas. The concept of triggers explains why sales of Mars candy bars increased while NASA was organizing its mission to Mars. People saw “Mars” in the news every day and were triggered to purchase the candy bars. Viral marketing should connect with and relate to the daily experiences of consumers.
• Emotion – Humans are fundamentally emotional creatures and emotional messages are the best at getting our attention. Whether it’s a cute cat video or a campaign to support disease research, tugging at the heartstrings of your audience is an important step toward getting them to share your content. Emotion ties back to social currency as content sharers may perceive a social benefit from appearing sensitive or demonstrating concern about an important social issue.
• Public – When a message is presented in a public place, people are more likely to share the message. Public presentation of a message acts as social proof of that message. If a social media user sees that many of his/her contacts (or a high-profile person) spreading a specific message, they may feel more inclined to share that message as well.
• Practical Value – A great way to help a message go viral is to ensure that it has some practical value when it is consumed or shared. People love being helpful to others or contributing to a cause, and will readily spread a viral message if it allows them to help someone.
• Stories – Humans think in terms of narratives, and there’s something about a truly compelling story that makes social media users want to spread it to their friends and contacts. Telling a great story about your company, product, or customers in a concise, high-impact format (especially video) is a great way to generate social engagement that drives brand recognition.

Methods and metrics

According to marketing, researchers think, to make viral marketing work, three basic criteria must be met, i.e., giving the right message to the right messengers in the right environment:^[rx]

1. Messenger: Three specific types of messengers are required to ensure the transformation of an ordinary message into a viral one: market mavens, social hubs, and salespeople. Market mavens are individuals who are continuously ‘on the pulse’ of things (information specialists); they are usually among the first to get exposed to the message and who transmit it to their immediate social network. Social hubs are people with an exceptionally large number of social connections; they often know hundreds of different people and have the ability to serve as connectors or bridges between different subcultures. Salespeople might be needed who receive the message from the market maven, amplify it by making it more relevant and persuasive, and then transmit it to the social hub for further distribution. Market mavens may not be particularly convincing in transmitting the information.
2. Message: Only messages that are both memorable and sufficiently interesting to be passed on to others have the potential to spur a viral marketing phenomenon. Making a message more memorable and interesting or simply more infectious, is often not a matter of major changes but minor adjustments. It should be unique and engaging with a main idea that motivates the recipient to share it widely with friends – a “must-see” element.^[rx]
3. Environment: The environment is crucial in the rise of successful viral marketing – small changes in the environment lead to huge results, and people are much more sensitive to environment. The timing and context of the campaign launch must be right.

Whereas Kaplan, Haenlein, and others reduce the role of marketers to crafting the initial viral message and seeding it, futurist and sales and marketing analyst Marc Feldman, who conducted IMT Strategies’ viral marketing study in 2001, carves a different role for marketers which pushes the ‘art’ of viral marketing much closer to ‘science’.^[rx]

Metrics

To clarify and organize the information related to potential measures of viral campaigns, the key measurement possibilities should be considered about the objectives formulated for the viral campaign. In this sense, some of the key cognitive outcomes of viral marketing activities can include measures such as the number of views, clicks, and hits for specific content, as well as the number of shares on social media, such as likes on Facebook or retweets on Twitter, which demonstrate that consumers processed the information received through the marketing message. Measures such as the number of reviews for a product or the number of members for a campaign web page quantify the number of individuals who have acknowledged the information provided by marketers. Besides statistics that are related to online traffic, surveys can assess the degree of product or brand knowledge, though this type of measurement is more complicated and requires more resources.^[rx][rx]

Methods

Viral marketing often involves and utilizes:

• Customer participation and polling services
• Industry-specific organization contributions
• Web search engines and blogs
• Mobile smartphone integration
• Multiple forms of print and direct marketing
• Target marketing web services
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media optimization (SMO)
• Television and radio
• Influencer marketing

Viral target marketing is based on three important principles:

1. Social profile gathering
2. Proximity market analysis
3. Real-time keyword density analysis

By applying these three important disciplines to an advertising model, a VMS company can match a client with its targeted customers at a cost-effective advantage.

The Internet makes it possible for a campaign to go viral very fast; it can, so to speak, make a brand famous overnight. However, the Internet and social media technologies themselves do not make a brand viral; they just enable people to share content with other people faster. Therefore, it is generally agreed that a campaign must typically follow a certain set of guidelines to potentially be successful:

• It must be appealing to most of the audience.
• It must be worth sharing with friends and family.
• A large platform, e.g. YouTube or Facebook must be used.^[rx]
• An initial boost to gain attention is used, e.g. seeding, buying views, or sharing to Facebook fans.
• The content is of good quality.
• Demographics – It must be correlated with the Region & Society.^[rx]

Viral Marketing Characteristics

All viral marketing examples—deliberate or accidental—have three things in common: the message, messenger, and environment. Each part must be leveraged to create a successful viral marketing campaign. Viral marketing campaigns may be created by any size business and can stand alone or be a part of a larger traditional campaign.

These campaigns may use several tools (e.g., videos, games, images, email, text messaging, and free products) to appeal to the emotions of users or viewers, raise awareness of a worthy cause, and make it easier to consume and share. Viral marketing often relies on the help of an influencer, who has a large network of followers.

With the help of social networks as a “force multiplier,” viral marketing is quicker than traditional marketing campaigns, as well as less expensive. Since it can receive so much traffic in a short time, it can also lead to mainstream media attention. Social media can also cause viral marketing efforts to misfire, as messages are altered, misconstrued, considered spam, or called out for missing the mark. Viral marketing success can also be hard to measure.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Viral Marketing

• Low cost: What characterizes viral campaigns is that the users do a significant part of the work for the brand, which drastically cuts down the costs of distribution. It is unnecessary to buy advertising or media space.
• Its potential to reach a lot of users: A viral video on the Internet can reach a huge international audience without having to invest a ton of money or make an extra effort. Due to this, a small company or even a private individual can go viral.
• It is not invasive. In viral marketing, the social media user is the one deciding to participate and share content, so it lessens the possibility of the brand coming across as invasive. Because of this, the perception of the brand and the interaction are significantly better, compared to more typical forms of advertising.
• It helps build up your brand. If you hit the bulls-eye in terms of creativity, you create content so incredible that users share it and develop a personal connection with your brand. It is without a doubt an extremely powerful tool when it comes to branding and awareness.

Viral marketing allows companies to better market their products by reaching consumers that ordinarily would not be targeted by traditional marketing campaigns. This expanded reach allows the company to enter new markets and potentially expand its customer base.

When done creatively, companies can trigger viral responses. For example, Burger King created a buzz when it posted pictures of its month-old, moldy Whopper in response to McDonald’s claim that their burgers don’t decompose. Burger King asserts that it uses only fresh ingredients and no preservatives, which should provide a better and healthier outcome for its customers. Its unappealing-looking burger was visible proof of that claim.

Viral marketing costs are a fraction of traditional advertising campaigns. And advertising is essentially free when consumers infectiously share their positive experiences with a company’s products and services with others.

Because the internet allows content to be shared easily and quickly, viral marketing can also trigger exponential and rapid growth. However, it is important to note that how quickly and easily content is shared is largely dependent on whether the company uses the right tools that make this possible.

Sometimes, viral marketing sparks a response counter to what was intended. Consumers tend to share negative news more often than positive news, and studies show that people have a stronger emotional response to negative news.2 Negative buzz can be detrimental to business and sometimes hard to recover from.

The effects of viral marketing are hard to measure as it is difficult to determine if a lead or sale resulted from it. And there is no consensus among businesses on how to measure their success.

If customers believe the viral campaign will compromise their privacy and security, they will likely not share. As a result, the company’s marketing mission fails, and its reputation may be tarnished. Future viral marketing campaigns may be adversely affected by previous unsuccessful attempts.

How online stores successfully execute viral marketing campaigns

Successful viral marketing focuses on psychology over selling. Knowing why people share information is more valuable than trying to convince them to buy a product. It’s also important to have an understanding of how and why users are communicating with each other.

Facebook users share content 47.5 billion times each day, while Twitter users average 208 followers each — that’s 208 people who see what they share and can be interested enough to retweet to their followers.

To devise a successful viral marketing campaign, an ecommerce company must:

• Know their audience: Understanding what the audience care about will tell companies what content to create; users will be more likely to share something related to their interests. For instance, a Fresno, California, firefighter named Cory Kalanick filmed his rescue of a kitten with a GoPro HD Hero3 camera attached to his helmet. According to Entrepreneur, the video garnered 1.5 million views on YouTube before GoPro found it. When the company made a few edits, added its logo, and put the final result on its own YouTube page, views rose to 5 million. The video was so successful because it focused on what consumers already care about – there is a long-running joke that the Internet is obsessed with cats. It also taps into their emotions, drawing sympathy, compassion, and a bit of self-insertion. Because of the video’s first-person viewpoint, viewers experience the heroism involved in saving an innocent kitten.
• Engage viewer emotions: Users are most likely to share content associated with positive emotions, such as joy and awe. Users were least likely to share things that inspired sadness, but this doesn’t mean that every piece of marketing has to be uplifting. The strength of emotion is the key factor, Berger said in a separate conversation with Entrepreneur.
• Make content easy to share: Hotmail nailed this technique. Its message went out every time a user sent an email, something they had already planned to do. Also, the advertising was subtle yet detailed, so it didn’t overshadow the intent of the original email. If your marketing content is on a social media website, keep it quick. Don’t overload readers with extensive text; instead, keep the message easy to scan. Videos should be short in length and small in file size, ensuring they don’t violate any posting restrictions. If the content is posted on the company site, use code or plugins to allow people to post the information directly to their social media profiles.

Viral Marketing FAQ

How Do I Make My Brand Go Viral?

Here are tips to help you make your brand go viral. Be attentive to emotions as they are the driving force behind viral marketing. Find a position and stick with it, rather than being neutral. Be creative and don’t make traditional ads. Be good at storytelling, seeking to evoke an emotional response from the follower. Don’t stop with one campaign; continue to keep your audience engaged. Lastly, make sure that you create a campaign that is easily and quickly shareable and where people can submit feedback or ask questions.

How Do You Make Money If Your Video Goes Viral?

To make money on a viral video, you must monetize it, generally by requiring subscribers to pay to view or by allowing companies to advertise to your audience in exchange for a fee. Companies either pay the creator to mention their products or services or run company-created ads before, during, or after their videos.

There are other ways to make money from a viral video other than the ones mentioned. For example, creators can license their videos, allowing third parties to use their content.

Why Is Transparency So Important in Viral Marketing?

Being transparent means being honest and open about operations and motives. Transparency in viral marketing is important as consumers are more critical of traditional marketing campaigns and are holding companies accountable for their actions more often than before. Approximately 94% of consumers are likely to be loyal to companies that are transparent in marketing.3

What Does “Seeding” Mean about a Viral Marketing Campaign?

Seeding is a marketing technique in which companies purposefully distribute viral information or content to select users who they think will effectively share the campaign.4 Most often, social media influencers are chosen as seeds to spread the word and solicit feedback about a product

What Are the Steps to Start a Viral Marketing Campaign?

First, identify the purpose of going viral. Are you seeking to improve your brand’s image or increase awareness? Then, find out more about your audience. Social media reporting is a good source of information about what is preferred by your target audience. The content you want to go viral needs to be configured to where it can be easily and quickly shared. If not, the campaign will likely fail at the start. Make sure that the content you want to be shared is organic and relatable. Lastly, use trends and hashtags to promote the content as they will capture the attention of your followers.

What Are Good Tools for Viral Marketing Campaigns?

There are many tools companies can use in their viral marketing campaigns. Companies can create and sponsor communities, which can be tapped to promote your products or services. Create and promote sweepstakes, contests, and rewards to generate buzz and capture a large audience. Other tools include sponsoring messages and chat blasts.

How Much Does a Viral Marketing Campaign Cost?

In general, a viral marketing campaign may cost anywhere from $100,000 to several million dollars.5

The Bottom Line

Viral marketing is an inexpensive and effective technique for increasing awareness and promoting a brand or product. Companies depend on their audience or targeted users to share advertising campaigns and their positive experiences with others. Successful campaigns can help the company grow, enter new markets, and increase revenues. Companies must choose the right platforms to advertise and format their content to where it can be easily shared. If done poorly, it can produce unfavorable results that could erode earnings and tarnish a company’s reputation.