Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy that urges people to pass advertisements; referred also as viral advertising or marketing buzz. Businesses may use viral marketing to increase brand awareness and increase sales. Viral marketing can be from a text messages, images, emails to simple video clips, flash games, advergames, ebooks, even web pages and software.
Types of Viral Marketing
Email – it is the first and most old fashioned type of viral marketing to be used globally, though new techniques are more popular today, it is still used but with some government policies it is getting complicated to use.
Video Clips – placing video clips in your website will keep your page to be interesting
Newsletter – it is likely more an email that includes more and profound valuable information if constructed in a good form can drive traffic for the website.
Blog – would be an effective tool for branding, and allows users to interact with one another regarding about a product or service.
Chat – a good tool to use, that you can provide personnel to readily answer questions to those who participate and join chat rooms.
Flash Games – considered to be highly effective to succeed a viral marketing but will surely be a bit costly to start with but after with you don’t have anything to pay for.
Take not also that though viral marketing would help you as a marketing campaign it may also bring some disadvantages. When emails, blogs, forums are use as channels it may be too annoying for the receivers when becomes large in amount and will be categorized as spam messages. Also, it is directed for short term advantages rather than long term benefits for businesses; it may be easily duplicate, replicate or copy due to the ability of marketing can be launch by everyone and could also possibly bring negative publicity.
But with its advantage no questions that with less effort for using such technique it can help you your business – products, services, branding to grow.
The marketer offering this service could be an application developer that offers readily made applications for business for their own branding. Something very popular and viral are jokes with a message (advertising the business)
Jeff Ackerman says
Liliana:
Good article on viral marketing. I have found that the most viral of all emails are those that are fake but what people want to believe. Fortunately if it sounds unrealistic one can go to Snopes.com and determine if it is real or fake.
Jeff