What is Viral Marketing?

What in the world does a virus have to do with marketing? Basically, Viral marketing is any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. These strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to oodles and oodles of people.

Viral Marketing is the concept or an idea or product that spreads because it has intrinsic value to your market. You don’t need to do a whole lot of traditional marketing for it. You just need to give it to a seed number of people and because its value is so compelling those people share it with their friends, colleagues and family.

Seth Godin says there are two different kinds of viral marketing. One kind where the marketing actually is the product or idea and one where a product is spread in the support of a higher purpose or cause.

However just because something is worthwhile does not mean it is going to go viral and on the same token just because something goes viral does not mean it is worthwhile.

Being viral isn’t the hard part. The hard part is making that viral element actually produce something of value, not just entertainment for the client or your boss.

Its so easy to want to get a product marketed virally that we often just rush through product creation and in the end our product becomes something cheap and boring.Effective viral marketing must start from the beginning. You must plan for a valuable viral element rather than rush something catchy off the press or create a worthwhile product and then stat thinking about how to market it.

Again, viral marketing works best only when you plan for it in your product creation.

Tagged with: Business • internet business • internet marketing • Marketing • online business • product creation • product marketing • viral marketing • word of mouth

Filed under: Marketing

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