Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge started in 2014. 

(see more at the end of this article)

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them more popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.  

Below are some examples of successful viral marketing, after looking at them and considering all the viral ads you have seen put below in the comments the link for your favorite viral marking. 

A) Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" campaign is the new face of viral marketing success. The uplifting promotional video generated record-breaking online interest, yielding more than 114 million views the first month. This was thanks in part to the Unilever brand's efforts to spread its message worldwide: Dove uploaded the video in 25 languages to 33 of its official YouTube channels, reaching consumers in more than 110 countries.


B) The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge became successful and viral with over 17 million people participating in the challenge worldwide. Many celebrities including Bill Gates, George W. Bush, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, Mark Zuckerberg, Rihanna, Tim Cook, Rafael Nadal, and Cristiano Ronaldo took part in the challenge.

C) The paving for pizza form domino pizza

The technology behind digital marketing

Developments in technology and the evolution of marketing are inextricably intertwined. Technology has underpinned major milestones in the history of marketing since its inception. The process tends to go something like this:

1 New technology emerges and is initially the preserve of technologists and early adopters.

2 The technology gains a firmer foothold in the market and starts to become more popular, putting it on the marketing radar.

3 Innovative marketers jump in to explore ways that they can harness the power of this emerging technology to connect with their target audience.

4 The technology migrates to the mainstream and is adopted into standard marketing practice.

The printing press, radio, television and now the internet are all examples of major breakthroughs in technology that ultimately altered forever the relationships between marketers and consumers, and did so on a global scale. But of course marketing isn’t about technology, it’s about people: technology is only interesting, from a marketing perspective, when it connects people with other people more effectively.

There are plenty of examples of technology through the ages having a significant impact on various markets – technology that may seem obscure, even irrelevant today. Remember Muzak.

The point is that technology has the ability to open up completely new markets, and to radically shake up existing ones. The mainstream adoption of digital technology – the internet, the software applications that run on it, and the devices that allow people to connect to both the network and each

other whenever, wherever and however they want to – promises to dwarf all that has come before it. It heralds the single most disruptive development in the history of marketing.

Whether that disruption represents an opportunity or a threat to you as a business who gets clients through advertising depends largely on your perspective. I hope the fact that you’re here means that you see it as an opportunity.

Social recommendation

When you share something in your social media, it means your friends will start to getting to know you by the things you share. Lets say you love to walk , perhaps you will share the trails you did in the past, how was your experience, perhaps what makes the experience better or even the products or shoes who make the walking more comfortable and enjoyable. If one of your friends is going to go for a trail experience he probably will trust your recommendations, and will seek your help in that matter. 

On the other side of the coin it is your name at stake when you give some recommendations, you don´t want to say something is good if you did not even taste it first, if you are recommending something base on receiving commission (if they discover that) you loose your credibility. So usually recommendation from a friend or even strangers are a good source of reliable information because people don´t appreciate to associate themselves with things or products they don´t approve first. 

the best part is you don´t have to pay to get those recommendations, if you only ask a customers for that , they usually will give it to you for free, it does represent also an opportunity for them to complain about something if the experience was not so good. 

that is valuable for your business for 2 reasons: you get your feedback to improve your business base on real assessment from your customers and also get your free review to publish on your website to increase sales. That service is not expensive and it is a great starting point as many other services we find today in online marketing. We call this reputation management.

There is a growing importance on social recommendations. According to a study by Mckinsey in 2014, social recommendations induced an average of 26% of purchase across all products categories. That should be enough for you not to underestimate the power of social media recommendation. 

More than ever people are going to buy from you because of your values and what YOU stand for instead of cheap prices + sales tricks.

 This title is a bold statement but I guess if you have been around for a while you have been victim for the system and unscrupulous companies and tricks for the purpose of just selling more. Because of that and some previous experience I become skeptical and careful to make decision regarded where to spend my money when hiring for services and everything else.

 

When we talk about branding, that is just building up the values of brand based on, or in other words what you or your brand stand for. You start do have a reputation for the way you do business and people now recognize that and they buy it from because of that.

 Big companies can have a reputation too, but when they become big , maybe too big, meaning they become public by raising money from the stock market, not been manage as small business anymore but by CEO and its committee They also get a lot of pressure from the market who want so see the stock to raise. Them, comes to play the biggest temptation to make more money than to stand loyal to its foundational values…

 We have seem many companies to change in the course of its development but the customer always vote with their choice and money to buy from who they believed stand for what they are in agreement with. How many times you have seem somebody buying a more expensive product from the competitor because they care for environment and they want to support that, or buy from that company for any other reason they want to support

 Technology, more specific the internet, has made the information much more accessible than before, we can buy and have business all around the world with the simple click of a mouse in the comfort of our homes or even in palm of our hands using our cell phones. With this increased market we also find hard to find out who deserve our trust, so in that sense we as clients are becoming more difficult to convince, and we resort to some tools to make our decisions. For example to buy a book we always look for the reviews on that book.

Today I just saw this event “Factor X live” a Brazilian advertising company claiming that people are preferring to buy from companies who approach them organically, that means people are ok with advertisement who are not perfect as long as they were honest, perhaps they prefer to see the owner of a English school talking honestly about his school than an ad professionally made using actors. Internet is making this possible, any small enterprise can reach millions of people with a very small budget for a very efficient online marketing, specially for information products that can be delivered instantaneously from the internet.

 If you never have try this before, meaning to have a online presence, perhaps you should try, it is never being so much easy and cheap to get your words and business to so many with so little to invest. Stick to your values, remember people are looking for you because of them,…. You can even hire someone to manage your online presence, as many business always bought some adverting in the past, nothing wrong with that….

 I want to conclude this article inviting you to share how it is been your Online experience ?? Good or bad ? not been online yet, in that case why ?