The term viral marketing implies marketing through the help of Internet or in other words online marketing of any product or service. Viral marketing is also sometimes called viral advertising. And the system is so much effective that it is considered as one of the most powerful marketing and advertising strategies on the Internet. Viral marketing is a system used to promote products and services through a suitable media distribution. It is a very successful marketing system and also a very cost effective method used to promote products.
Viral marketing did not get its name because any virus is involved in the process but it adopted the pattern of marketing through word of mouth network. Viral marketing depends on a high rate of pass-along-the-advertisement from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward the advertisement to a large number of friends then the overall growth speeds up quite quickly. If the pass-along numbers are too low, the overall growth slows down too.
Viral marketing follows the successful method of multi level marketing and applies it to all customers. Though there are several successful marketing strategies this method is supposed to be of more powerful than many other marketing techniques. This viral marketing can be purposefully applied to a variety of products, such as web hosted address books, calendars, list of servers and news group readers.
A brief history
The term viral marketing was proposed by a professor called Jeffrey F. Rayport of Harvard Business School in a December 1996. It was further used and popularized by Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997, while they were describing the Hotmail's e-mail practice of advertising. The Hotmail was the first to use viral marketing through their emails.
Elements of viral marketing
Recent study has shown that some viral marketing have worked wonders for the company, but some have failed to gain popularity with their products or services. There are few effective elements of viral marketing, which should be followed to make the strategy a hit. It is not necessary to follow all the elements of the marketing strategy but the more you take up the better result you get. These elements of viral marketing are as followed -
- Provides system for effortless transfer to others: Viral marketing works widely on the Internet because, instant communication is an easy, effortless and inexpensive medium.
- Gives away valuable products or services: Viral marketers practice delayed gratification because they know that they may not profit today but if they manage to generate interest from anything free, they will profit fast and easy.
- Exploits common motivations and behavioral skills: Intelligent viral marketing plans take advantages of common human motivations and behaviors.
- Upgrades easily from small network to a very large network: Building scalability is most importantly required for a viral model.
- Utilizes existing communication for networking: Internet has by far proved to be the most widely communicating medium for marketing through marketing by individuals.
- Takes advantage of others' resources: The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the job done.
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