When used correctly, viral marketing or viral advertising is by far the best way to promote your website, products and services on the internet.
Viral advertising involves a virus-like rapid transfer of a marketing message across the web, resulting from the use of free viral marketing tools like YouTube, Flickr or Facebook, designed to go viral. Successful viral marketing results in this snowball factor:
- An exponential increase in users of the free viral marketing product
- free exponential increase in website traffic which in turn helps to
- improve search engine rankings, which in turn leads to
- more free web traffic and so on…
The degree of success depends on the extent to which the 9 success criteria are followed.
9 Viral Marketing Success Criteria
As many and ideally all of the following tactics should be used:
1. Make an irresistible free offer
You need to provide a free viral marketing product or service, as “free” is the biggest customer magnet. “Free” even attracts people who might not otherwise be interested.
2. Create a viral marketing product – Don’t just try to market a product virally
A product is not necessarily viral if it contains some features that give it viral characteristics. Just having a “Refer a Friend” option on one of your web pages does not make your website viral. For the free viral product to be considered truly viral, there must be more than 1 new user for every user who recommends it.
3. Target alpha users
The viral advertising message must be directed to individuals with a high potential for social networks, the so-called influencers, ideal for spreading it. When it comes to the consumer market, influencers are well connected, have an impact, have active minds and set trends.
So what makes an influencer want to deliver a viral message? Responses include the need to be loved (or fear of failure) and the need to be successfully rejected (fear of failure). For example, consider which free messages and products would generate respect and appreciation for the sender when received.
Major and effective online influencers take a serious approach and want to deliver only helpful viral marketing messages, not silly videos, pranks, or commercials with no purpose or marketing results. They want to be perceived as responsible by the recipients; your network The product they recommend should be optimally suited to the needs of the users. Talking tough sales is not the way.
4. Get creative and stay ahead of market trends
Study your market and its trends and learn to think ahead to deliver what excites people, at exactly the right time and in the right way. Has…
- the ability and knowledge to come up with an innovative product?
- expert knowledge to share?
- ideas and a network of associates to inspire and motivate you?
- What are the right web business tools and resources?
5. Easy transfer is a prerequisite
The viral marketing message should be short and easily transferable through one or more of the following digital media:
- website
- Instant messaging
- graphics
- software download
- social networks means social networking websites, here below social networking sites, online communities, blogs, wikis, etc. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which make it easy to share viral messages by automating the distribution process.
The interaction between Internet users is greatly facilitated by the use of Web 2.0, a design standard, which makes viral marketing possible. Examples of inherently viral Web 2.0 sites are MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr. These sites are both free-to-user viral marketing products and viral advertising tools for both businesses and users.
6. Use Existing Social Networks
The distribution of the viral message takes place within the established social networks of the people who receive it: around 10 people within their closest circle and up to thousands within their wider network, depending on the person’s status and job. Affiliate programs often inspire affiliates to target their network. Once you reach an online influencer with an extensive network, it starts to snowball, as long as the viral product is useful and of high quality and the marketing message is compelling. Social networking websites are important viral marketing tools.
7. Use the resources of others
Spread your viral marketing message by placing articles on other websites (the media) thus reaching a much larger group of people than if you had relied solely on your own website. By getting your message out as news, you are targeting many subscribers who might decide to visit your home page or even place your article on your website. An example of effective viral marketing is placing YouTube videos on different websites from where interested visitors can copy the video to their own site.
8. Allow large-scale traffic
It is imperative that the resources to handle all the traffic can be scaled quickly to avoid overloading and breaking the replication cycle of the viral marketing campaign. To handle the expected high volume of users, the process must be fully automated. For example, customers receive emails through sequential autoresponders.
9. Measure and optimize Viral Marketing Success parameters
To achieve true successful viral marketing, monitor the results expressed by certain parameters, then test and optimize them. Examples of parameters include
- traffic sources
- % Registered users
- % of users who send invitations
- number of invitations sent per user
- % of invitations received
