What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing is the term used for any marketing strategy that encourages a person to pass along a marketing message that they’ve received to others, thus creating the potential for growth in the message’s exposure and impact.  It’s called “viral” marketing due to the rapid rate at which the message can be spread.  And while the name may not be attractive or inviting, the usefulness of viral marketing surely is. 

Viral marketing is successful only when the message contains something that people find useful or worthy of sharing.  Whether it be a coupon, free offer or information it must be of a certain level of quality to entice recipients to share it with others.  Without that facet there would be no urge to pass it along. 

The history of viral marketing proves its usefulness in the modern marketing world.  For years business was dependent on word-of-mouth advertising as a marketing method.  When you sold someone a high quality product or provided them with a top notch service you could count on them telling their family, friends and neighbors, thereby increasing the traffic in your business.  But like with the viral marketing of today, you must’ve had something of value to cause people to want to pass your business’s name along to others.

The statistics on viral marketing prove its worthiness as a marketing tool.  With well over 90% of people saying that they would recommend a product, service or web site to someone they know if they were satisfied with it.  Whereas only 1% of people said they would recommend a site even if they were dissatisfied with it.  So you can easily see where viral marketing can be an incredibly useful marketing tool.

The use of this marketing method on the internet has brought it to many people’s attention merely because of the massive number of people who can be affected by this type of marketing in an incredibly short period of time.  Hence the great interest everyone has taken in it.  Consider this, what other method of marketing could be used to reach millions of people in the course of a relatively short period of time with next to no cost at all to the advertiser?  And all the while your marketing message is being passed around, the fact that someone is recommending it to another person by passing it along is a no-strings-attached endorsement.  You’d be hard pressed to top that with any other advertising method in use today.

<< Previous    [1]  2  3  4  5  ...7    Next >>