Viral Marketing? What? What do viruses have to do with marketing? Viral marketing is the technique to mimic the spreading of a virus in the marketing scheme of a product. Word of mouth marketing that is grass-roots motivated. These strategies exploit exponential multiplication to spread the message to hundreds and thousands of people.
The products, ideas, or concepts that spread in a viral way do so because they have intrinsic built in value to our market. With this built in value you don’t need to do a ton of traditional marketing to get the word out. All you do is give the idea, product or concept away for free to a select few who will then carry the message to those they know and so forth.
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.
But just because something goes viral does not mean its worthwhile and just because something is worthwhile does not mean its going to go viral.
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.
Too many times we’ve let viral marketing catch our imagination and have focused solely on getting something to go viral rather than creating something of real value. in our mad rush to make something catch fire we short-change ourselves and the product ends up being boring and selfish. Viral Marketing starts at the beginning. You need to plan for it. Its nearly impossible to create a valuable product and then once its complete decide you want market it virally.
Again, viral marketing works best only when you plan for it in your product creation.
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