Continued...
Viral Marketing Defined
What does a virus have to
do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any
strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a
marketing message to others, creating the potential for
exponential growth in the message's exposure and
influence. Like viruses, such strategies take
advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message
to thousands, to millions.
Off the Internet, viral
marketing has been referred to as
"word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz,"
"leveraging the media," "network
marketing." But on the Internet, for better or
worse, it's called "viral marketing." While
others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to
somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term
"viral marketing" has stuck.
The Classic Hotmail.com
Example
The classic example of
viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free
Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:
- Give away free e-mail
addresses and services,
- Attach a simple tag at
the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get
your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com"
and,
- Then stand back while
people e-mail to their own network of friends and
associates,
- Who see the message,
- Sign up for their own
free e-mail service, and then
- Propel the message
still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of
friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading
ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a
carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples
outward extremely rapidly.
Elements of a Viral
Marketing Strategy
Accept this fact. Some
viral marketing strategies work better than others, and
few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But
below are the six basic elements you hope to include in
your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not
contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it
embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to
be. An effective viral marketing strategy:
- Gives away products or
services
- Provides for
effortless transfer to others
- Scales easily from
small to very large
- Exploits common
motivations and behaviors
- Utilizes existing
communication networks
- Takes advantage of
others' resources
Let's examine at each of
these elements briefly.
1. Gives away valuable
products or services
"Free" is the
most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most
viral marketing programs give away valuable products or
services to attract attention. Free e-mail services,
free information, free "cool" buttons, free
software programs that perform powerful functions but
not as much as you get in the "pro" version.
Wilson's Second Law of Web Marketing is "The Law of
Giving and Selling" (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm).
"Cheap" or "inexpensive" may
generate a wave of interest, but "free" will
usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice
delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or
tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of
interest from something free, they know they will profit
"soon and for the rest of their lives" (with
apologies to "Casablanca"). Patience, my
friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other
desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you
earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses,
advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities.
Give away something, sell something.
2. Provides for
effortless transfer to others
Public health nurses
offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people
who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your
eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're
easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing
message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail,
website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing
works famously on the Internet because instant
communication has become so easy and inexpensive.
Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing
standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so
it can be transmitted easily and without degradation.
Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private,
free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message
is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of
every free e-mail message.
3. Scales easily from
small to very large
To spread like wildfire
the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from
small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model
is that a free e-mail service requires its own
mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is
wildly successful, mailservers must be added very
quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If
the virus multiplies only to kill the host before
spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have
planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers
rapidly you're okay. You must build in scalability to
your viral model.
4. Exploits common
motivations and behaviors
Clever viral marketing
plans take advantage of common human motivations. What
proliferated "Netscape Now" buttons in the
early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed
drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved,
and understood. The resulting urge to communicate
produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail
messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on
common motivations and behaviors for its transmission,
and you have a winner.
5. Utilizes existing
communication networks
Most people are social.
Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students
are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each
person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close
network of friends, family, and associates. A person's
broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or
thousands of people, depending upon her position in
society. A waitress, for example, may communicate
regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week.
Network marketers have long understood the power of
these human networks, both the strong, close networks as
well as the weaker networked relationships. People on
the Internet develop networks of relationships, too.
They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs.
Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do
permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message
into existing communications between people, and you
rapidly multiply its dispersion.
6. Takes advantage of
others' resources
The most creative viral
marketing plans use others' resources to get the word
out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or
graphic links on others' websites. Authors who give away
free articles, seek to position their articles on
others' webpages. A news release can be picked up by
hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles
seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone
else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing
message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather
than your own.
"Copyright ©
2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail
Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web
Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission
granted to reprint this article on your website without
alteration if you include this copyright statement and
leave the hyperlinks live and in place."
|
Viral
Marketing
