One term that has become extremely popular with the advent of the
social media is viral marketing. Even though it is always associated with
social media, this term has been widely used to describe the meme culture or
even in the era, where social media was not very popular (Schulze et al., 2014). Viral marketing is
defined as a strategy that encourages people to mass marketing message to the
others. The term itself is derived from the word ‘virus’, which explains how
the campaign of this marketing strategy is carried out through a rapid
multiplication and brings exponential growth. The idea behind the whole ordeal
is about spreading the message to as many as people as possible in limited time
frame. In the age of the internet, word of mouth,
creating a buzz, and network marketing are some of the terms that are associated
with viral marketing.
The way Hotmail.com gained its popularity as the first free web-based email strategy is one of the earliest examples of how viral marketing works. The marketing strategy applied involved giving away free e-mail addresses and services, followed by attaching a simple tag at the bottom of each message which was sent out, which read that: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” (Aslay et al., 2015; Schulze et al., 2014) (Figure 2). At that time, it was a far cry from some of other e-mailing services as they were charging hefty sums for the free e-mail, but none of them provided the same features as Hotmail offered. As the result, people seeing the message followed the link and signed up with their own Hotmail account. The message then was propelled far apart to the much wider audience using the ever increasing array of friends and associates that were using Hotmail service (Aslay et al., 2015).
Some viral marketing strategies work better than others. Few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com
strategy.
Listed below are the six basic elements that can be included in a viral marketing strategy:
Listed below are the six basic elements that can be included in a viral marketing strategy:
1 . Giving away the
product or services to potential customers
3 . Scaling easy from smaller to the
larger customers
4 . Common motivations
and consumer behaviour
5 . Utilising the
already existing customer communication network
6 . Taking advantage of the existing
resources
Coming
towards some of the benefits and the drawbacks of the viral marketing, one of
the biggest benefits that viral marketing offers is the low marketing cost.
Additionally, it allows faster spread of the message and makes sure that the
mainstream media exposure is allowed.
The lead generation is also something that works out well in case of the
viral marketing (Schulze et al.,
2014).
On
the other hand, one of the things that does not seem to work out effectively
with viral marketing is the nuisance factor that it seems to provide. At times,
due to the overexposure, like excessive emails or viral marketing messages that
people might be receiving daily for example, the feel-good factor diminishes (Schulze et al., 2014). The freshness of the message is lost, and people might start considering it as spam. Another consideration is the way
negative marketing buzz. A message in the viral marketing might not come across
as intended and there is all the possibility that it would be discussed in a
negative light. Also, it can be a tedious task to measure and to evaluate the
success of the viral marketing (Schulze
et al., 2014).
Taking
things from the customers’ perspective, the decision making has become harder
for the customer these days as people are suffering from ‘short memory’ (Dinh et al., 2014). In this case, the short term
memory means that the decision-making
process involves paradox of choice (Schulze et al., 2014).
Accordingly, people are likely to be influenced by adverts and marketing
campaigns that they see. Nevertheless, even though they would be influenced by
it, they would be inclined to move towards some of the viral marketing messages
in the given time period (Aslay
et al., 2015). So
in the case of the viral marketing, the
customers would be somehow hammered about the message and be reminded about it
again and again (Aslay et al.,
2015).
Another
thing that works well with the consumers’
behaviour is that they are more likely to purchase a commodity or opt for a
service if they see their peers and acquaintances using the same products (Aslay et al., 2015). In other words, they are more
likely to trust the judgment of their friends rather than of some random
marketer, who probably have no idea about the perceived benefits that the
product has to offer. Then, there comes
the perceived risks behind every choice that is made by the consumers. As
expected, those risks are curtailed to a great extent if the endorsement is coming from their friends or
people whom they trust (Aslay et al., 2015).
Considering
all of the characteristics of viral marketing that have been discussed above,
viral marketing, especially in the context of Australian market, has a lot of
potential when it is used with smart communication tools (Dinh et al., 2014).
Schulze, C., Schöler, L., & Skiera, B.
(2014). Not all fun and games: Viral marketing for utilitarian products. Journal of Marketing, 78(1), 1-19. Retrieved from
http://journals.ama.org/doi/abs/10.1509/jm.11.0528
Aslay, C., Lu, W., Bonchi, F., Goyal., A.,
& Lakshmanan, L. V. (2015). Viral marketing meets social advertising: Ad
allocation with minimum regret. Proceedings
of the VLDB Endowment, 8(7),
814-825. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2752950
Dinh, T. N., Zhang, H., Nguyen, D. T., &
Thai, M. T. (2014). Cost-effective viral marketing for time-critical campaigns
in large-scale social networks. IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Networking, 22(6), 2001-2011. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6678627/
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