When you bought an item or availed of a service of a certain company and are satisfied with what you got, won’t you recommend that to a friend? And when you give your recommendation, doesn’t your friend buy or avail of it as well.
More often than not, we express our satisfaction with some item or service by telling our friends and relatives about our experience. Some of them will actually try the same product or service that we recommended. Essentially, we have just successfully promoted the product through word-of-mouth without the establishment having to spend money on it.That is the gist behind Viral Advertising. Viral Internet Marketing is an promotion protocol that entices people to pass on a marketing message to their family and friends. It is called as such because of its similarity to an virus that easily spreads out, with an exponential growth, once an person gets “sick”.
How did this marketing phenomenon start?
The idea of Viral Internet Marketing, which is passing along a message, has been around for a long time now, even for 100′s of years. There was just no specific name for it until 1997 when Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, came up with the term “Viral Advertising” to describe Hotmail’s marketing practice back then. Hotmail’s practice was to append an advertisement of itself on each message that is sent using their service. When a recipient gets interested and clicks on the ad, it will lead to Hotmail’s website for him to signup. This will go on and on, and the growth is similar to an exponential curve.
Types of Viral Internet Marketing.
There are unique ways to apply Viral Internet Marketing plans.
*Pass-along. This is the most common type of Viral Marketing. Web pages that ask their users to refer-a-friend about their products and services is an example of pass-along messaging. However, there is a risk of the message being labeled as “spam” by email providers. Thus, it is imperative that the “from” and “subject” lines do not contain any word that may be tagged as spam.
*Incentive virals. This is a marketing technique used by businesses in which users are offered rewards when they refer somebody to the company. This becomes more useful when the referred individual needs to do something for the reward to be given.
*Undercover. The most difficult viral to spot, undercover marketing issues a viral message that is disguised as just an unusual page or piece of news without obvious link citations.
*Edgy gossip or buzz marketing. This type is most common in the entertainment world. A good example is the spread of different controversies, like getting married or divorced, involving the actors of a movie that is yet to be released. This is like word-of-mouth advertising for the movie about to be released.
Methods of Transmission
Spreading the viral message can be done in unique ways.
*Email. This is the most general kind, when people forwards messages such as inspirational messages, jokes, funny clips and pictures that advertises a certain product or service.
*Instant Messaging. People who receive links from friends through instant messaging servers, like Skype, Yahoo or MSN, are more likely to check it out because of the notion of urgency of the sender.
*Web sites. Most of the articles now published on the internet have a link that says “Send to a friend.” This is one way to make the article reach a good number of people by just posting it in one site.
*Word of mouth. Of course, this is the traditional way of passing on a message to another person; and most of the time, the most reliable method too.
*Social Media. Let’s use Facebook as an example. You read an article, at the bottom or top of the article is a “Like” button for Facebook. If you liked the article you click the button. The article is displayed on your Facebook wall. Your friends sees it, read it, like it. Their friends do the same…etc. etc. etc. This is strong stuff! More examples are Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Delicious & many more.
Although there are several ways on how to do this kind of advertising, there are also limits to it. One was already mentioned, which is the risk of the message being labeled as “spam.” Since many businesses now are make use of this recipe and promoting their services through email, email providers proactively designed some sort of screen in their system to separate potential spam emails from the more reliable ones. Other barriers can be the size and format of the viral message. If the content is a video clip, its reach may be limited because of size limitations of most of the email providers. Media format is also one thing to take notice of because not all recipients of the message may have the right application to open the file.
But despite of these limits, businesses are already getting into this kind of marketing. Indeed, this technique assists in dramatically increasing revenues by reaching a massive number of the target market without having to spend a big chunk of money for advertisements. Viral Marketing will definitely go a long way, especially on the internet, and it’s FREE for the most part.
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