Viral Marketing

What is it?

Viral marketing leverages the trust we place in friends or social networks to distribute advertising messages quickly to a large number of people in a short amount of time, usually through email. Other modes of transmission include instant messaging programs and internet forms that send emails onto others.

Viral marketing tends to work best when it involves either some kind of humorous or outrageous content (for example, a funny video, or a controversial message), so that people forward it on to members of their social group, or email list.

Viral Marketing Strategies

Viral marketing is described as 'underground' when it disguises an advertising message within some appealing content. This can be particularly effective, as people are very willing to pass on a funny picture or link when they don't think it contains commercial content. However, it can also backfire if people discover that it was promotional material, and decide to boycott the company responsible.

More conventional tactics involve asking web-users to forward on special offers to friends and family, providing some incentive to the forwarder, or the simple chain letter. These methods might be incorporated with some sort of game, where players are encouraged to sign up new players.

A well-known example of viral marketing was Burger King's Subservient Chicken website, used to promote a new chicken burger. The site was a parody of B-Grade porn websites, involving a guy dressed in a chicken suit, performing any actions that were typed into the site by visitors. The site generated around a million hits in the first 24 hours it was online.

Implications for Advertisers

Viral marketing can be a cost-effective way of generating interest or brand awareness, but it does have limitations. It really only works for certain products, and there is the danger that viral marketing can look like (and, in some cases can effectively be) spam.

Email Marketing Conversion Data