What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is a process of marketing that is self replicating. It facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message. Viral marketing is similar to word-of-mouth marketing as in both cases a business does something and the customer tells five to ten people about it. However, in the case of viral marketing, the customer tells five to ten people and then those people tell five to ten people. Some products are engineered to be marketed in this way. For example when Skype and Facebook first started there was a strong incentive for customers to tell other people to join, by making it easier to invite friends they improved their viral growth rate.
Advantages vs. Disadvantages
Like almost anything, viral marketing has upsides and downsides. On the one hand, viral marketing campaigns are a free way to market your product. The way that people now use social media and email has made it easier for the campaign to thrive. The biggest advantage of viral marketing is that it doesn’t take any time, people keep passing the message along to the next person. On the other hand, you never know who may be passing your message along and whether or not you would want to be associated with them. Also, if not done correctly, your message could be seen as spam and thrown away by potential customers.
Examples of Viral Marketing
Although some of these examples are not examples of businesses using viral marketing, they do show how fast something can spread across the world if people have access to the information. These are just some of my favorite examples of viral marketing-
1. Diet Coke and Mentos -
This
fad ran across the USA faster than Forest Gump every kid around the
country now knew how to make a car bomb out of soda and candy.
2. Burger Kings Subservient Chicken -
This was a great example of Viral Marketing even though Burger King did not make much money off of the campaign.
3. Ronaldinho Golden Boots Video -
This commercial absolutely killed it for Nike Futbol. Who remembers this one? He puts on the Nike shoes and all the sudden he is doing impossible tricks on the field during practice. Although this commercial was proven to be fake no one could prove it for the longest time. So when you wanted to show your friends the crazy move Ronaldinho was performing they would also see him put on those gold Nikes, tricky but smart!