subject: Viral Marketing Redefined with Mass Cash Cover Up [print this page] Viral Marketing Redefined with Mass Cash Cover Up
Viral marketing is the new publicity and publicity trend right now, especially in the online scene. It takes blessing of the internet's network effect to be able to reach a superb number of persons in such a brief time.
Benefit of Viral Marketing
Viral promotion strategies present numerous advantages to businesses.
- Easy to execute. There are many procedure of sending viral contents or messages and all of them are easy to do. Among those methods are sending email, instant messaging, and using web sites. Sending viral messages through these media will not take much effort and time.
- Low-cost. As compared to sending direct mails, viral publicity proves to be cheaper and a more cost-effective strategy. With just a small investment on viral promotion, its competency can reach even hundreds of thousands of people as compared to spending the same amount of income to traditional advertising methods. That is because the only livelihood to contribute is for sending the basic set of viral contents, then forwarding or replicating the communication will not require supplementary costs anymore.
- Good targeting. With viral publicity, there is a magnificent probability that the message will reach persons that are interested in it. Since the concept of viral publicity is basically passing on a communication from an user to another person, most likely, the user will pass it to a person whom he knows will be interested in it. Thus, the percentage of wasted publicity, which is sending the message to the wrong market, will be reduced.
- High and swift response rate. Since viral marketing reaches a good number of the business' target market, there is also a big possibility to have a high turnover ratio. Even if the responses will not immediately convert into profits, there will still be huge traffic that the business will receive which is what most web owners want.
These are indeed wonderful benefits a company can collect by adopting this marketing technique. But what really makes it more powerful than other marketing or marketing strategies?
Let us take the instance of Hotmail, where this viral marketing term really started. Hotmail was able to spread over the internet at an amazing rate. It is like an epidemic that quickly spreads out to others once there is a single person infected by the virus. That is why this procedure was named as such.
According to Hotmail's statistics, its number of subscribers grew from zero to twelve million users in just 18 months. Imagine that! What's more amazing is that the firm spent just $50,000 on publicity to achieve that number of subscribers. Compare that to Juno which spent $20 million on traditional advertising during the same time period as Hotmail but got much less output.
With those facts about Hotmail, viral marketing's main strength is indeed reaching a huge number of the target market at a considerably low cost. Hotmail did not even have promotion or publicity presence in most countries outside the United States but it got to be the major email product provider in these places like India and Sweden.
What adds more power to viral promotion is the fact that the viral message passed on is like an endorsement from a friend or somebody who can be trusted. Persons this way of trying that "if my friend uses this product and is happy about it, what stops me from using it as well?"
In Hotmail's case, when those people who received an email from their friends, relatives, or colleagues using Hotmail learned that it works and their friend is an user, they quickly signed up and became members as well. These individuals wanted to belong in this group where their friends are also in. This strategy is additionally a matter of affiliation or affiliation.
Hotmail's case is not an isolated one, though. During the same time that Hotmail is gaining its popularity, so does ICQ. ICQ is like a buddy list and instant messenger, much like MSN and Yahoo Messenger now. ICQ additionally used the same tactics and advertising campaign and it gained almost the same number of subscribers as Hotmail within the same time frame.
Viral promotion is indeed one powerful weapon to increase popularity of a product or product. However, just like any other things, precise use of the system is basic. A single mistake of misuse of it may mean permanent damage to the product or service being promoted.
