What is Viral Marketing?

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.

Products or ideas that have native, intrinsic value spread in a very viral way because of the apparent value it has to the market. It doesn’t need to be ’sold’ by some fancy salesman for it to make money. With this built in value then all you need to do is present it to a seed group of people who will then take it to their colleagues and it will spread at a grass roots level.

There are two types of viral marketing according to Seth Godin. One type where the product or idea is spread in the support of a cause and the other where the marketing actually is the product too. (Youtube, Hotmail).

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.

Remember: viral marketing only works when you make a plan to implement it from the beginning. So do your best now to create something of great worth and then show it to your colleagues, even give to them for free to get them to understand its true value.

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