Viral Marketing

Viral marketing – is a marketing technique that uses existing social networking services and other technologies to produce increases in brand awareness or to try and increase sales.

Viral marketing techniques have many different forms, from a video to an entire interactive website dedicated to promoting a product. But no matter how an advert is presented it’s always distributed the same way and that’s by word of mouth, hence the name “viral” because it spread from person to person quickly.

Since the advert itself is purely distributed on social media sites it doesn’t cost the company as much as the same advert being on television, because even if the production value is the same they don’t have to pay for air time. Also via the Internet it can reach more people, especially now days when most people don’t watch TV live and a viral campaign can last anywhere between a few days and a week and if it’s successful enough you could see it everywhere for that time period.

It can help raise reputation for a brand if the advert is well received and people praise it. Increase in reputation means it can ultimately increase sales when a person goes to buy a product, let’s say deodorant they will most likely pick the brand that they have heard more favourable opinions of rather than the others; not that the other brands are worse it’s just that one in particular was on everyone’s mind thanks to a recent viral advert.

Now viral marketing does come with some serious disadvantages, for starters its very high risk; you may put days and a fair bit of money into making an advert to have no one notice it and have it not take off at all. The other big risk that comes with it is that you have no control once you put it out there so it may not get to the audience it was intended for or people may get a different message than originally indented like people thinking Nivia was telling black people to get civilized with one of their campaigns, which is most likely the last thing they indented. Exposing your promotion directly to social media is very dangerous too as Skittles learned when they linked their website with twitter to show kids that they were ‘hip’ and up to date but other people got wind of this and decided to it would be funny to post how the sweets can give you cancer. So instead of promoting the brand and showing that they were a consumer friendly company they had their customer base terrified of ever buying from them ever again.

But it always seems to be the more interactive and out there viral ad campaigns that sometimes people just don’t get or sabotage, so if you just make a fun advert with the right messaging that could be used for TV and put it on the Internet instead you should be fine. So even with the risks involved its still an effective way to promote your product you just have to be more careful than usual so it doesn’t harm the product or company name.