Viral Marketing: Grow or Die! Viral marketing is a crude-sounding term that has stuck like gum on a shoe in Internet marketing circles. Viral marketing is incredibly cost effective. A virus lives hidden until it is so pervasive that it swamps the world with a huge volume of occurences. A virus sucks on the resources of others to increase the numbers of its ilk. A virus will grow exponentially by replicating over and over, exploding exponentially.
Sounds disgusting but viral marketing enabled services like hotmail to skyrocket in the early days of the Web and more recently companies like Wikia to become a top 2,000 site based on Alexa rankings - spending peanuts on marketing.
Viral marketing encourages individuals to pass on its marketing message to others, creating the potential for enormous growth in the message's brand exposure. Viral marketing takes advantage of social networks to rapidly expand messaging into the thousands or even millions of people over time.
The strategies of a viral marketing campaign include:
- Give away something of value for free
- Convey a message (often using a tagline) with every communication sent out (e.g. "Free, secure email").
- Encourage people to pass along the message to their network of contacts who take action and pass along the message to their friends
- Grow like crazy
Here are the five elements of a viral marketing campaign. Master them and thrive. Ignore them and spend way more on marketing than your competitors.
- Give something of value away for free
- Make is easy for others to pass along your message
- Tap into the networks of others
- Leverage the power of herd behavior
- Make sure your hosting service has an easy-to-scale plan so you don't end up like the schmucks in the IBM commercials.
