Viral Marketing Article

Here’s a draft of an article written for the IdeasFactory website. Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

(Target audience are independent creative people or small businesses)

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Viral Marketing

Almost everyone now receives “viral” emails. Every day most people receive jokes, games and increasingly video content passed on by their friends.

But how could this sort of idea help you to promote yourself and what you do?

What is a viral?

A viral is any piece of content which people will like enough to send to their friends and colleagues, usually by email. If the content is good enough, the number of viewings grows exponentially until it’s been seen by a large number of people

Succincly put by Wikipedia, “It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online”

Virals can comprise text, audio, video, games, imagery, animation or in fact any kind of digital content. You’ve probably had most types in your inbox this week.

Why are they useful?

The most successful users of viral marketing are large companies who have realised that the method is a cheaper and more effective alternative to traditional broadcast advertising. TV advertising costs a fortune, has to be delivered in video only, and is highly competitive.

However if the advert is good enough, why not release it virally? It costs almost nothing to release (all you have to do is email it to as many people as possible), it can be interactive, and it may in the end even be seen by more people than would watch a TV advert.

A good example of this is Budweiser’s Virtual Bartender game. Far more interactive and risque than any TV advert, it was an incredibly successful campaign.

A month after release, it had been played about ten million times for an average time of seven minutes. It’s still being played by hundreds of thousands of visitors a week. This is of far higher value to the company than a TV ad, probably cost far less to produce and almost nothing to distribute.

How can individuals and small businesses make the most of Viral Marketing?

The great thing is that if there’s no broadcaster necessary, you’re in just as good a position to release viral content as a much larger company (even if your budget is a bit smaller)

Anyone can use this technique, whatever it is that you do and whatever kind of budget and time you have. All you need is a bit of imagination.

The problem is that there’s a lot of viral content going around nowadays. The thing is to create something which is good enough to break through into people’s inboxes.

If you want some encouragement, a good place to start is the Lycos chart (http://viral.lycos.co.uk/) which displays some of the most successful viral content now in circulation. You’ll soon see how terrible most of it is. Hopefully this should give you some inspiration on how you can do it better.

Here are some basic rules for creating a successful viral campaign.

1. Create a piece of “killer” content. Something that provokes a reaction whether it’s funny, wierd or maybe even very sad. It doesn’t matter as long as someone who sees it will remember who you are, want to use your service or product, and / or will send it on to others who may do the same.

2 Whatever it is, make sure it links back to your website in some way and if possible encourages people to buy from or work with you.

3. Make it targetted and relevant. Sometimes making something which is relevant to a particular group of people (ideally your customers) works much better.

For example if you work mainly with Triumph enthusiasts, yoga teachers, or estate agents, make something that’s relevant to that group of people. In-jokes are always a good thing. People love receiving content which is relevant to them. The smaller the group you’re targetting, the more they’re likely to pass it on to everyone else they know who’s interested in the same subject.

4. If possible try to make sure that you have some way of tracking how many people have seen the content. The best way of doing this is by making sure that your content is on a web page somewhere which has some kind of statistics attached to see how many hits you’re getting. This is a much better idea than attaching your files directly to an email.

Now all that’s left to do is to send it on to as many people as possible, and see what happens.

Further reading

Kerb Viral Case Studies: Brighton based agency specialising in Viral Marketing Campaigns. Some excellent case studies on successful campaigns run for medium sized companies.

http://www.kerb.co.uk/THINKING/viral/

VW “Suicide Bomber” Advert:

A controversial advert made supposedly for Volkswagen. However the company denied any connection with the campaign.

http://www.jalopnik.com/cars/adspromotions/volkswagen-disavows-suicide-bomb-ad-viral-marketing-firm-connected-030734.php