If you are wondering what is Viral Marketing, let me show you a simple and vivid example that we can all live with.
It is about how the COVID-19 virus spreads quickly and frighteningly, and how the strongest and largest medical sectors around the world collapsed before it!
Have you now come to the definition of Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is the rapid spread of advertising of goods and services at an astonishing viral speed among the largest possible number of customers.
Below, during this new article, we will learn in detail about viral marketing and its most prominent strategies and how they can be applied to products and services, let's start…
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is one of the types of word of mouth marketing that is followed in order to market and promote a product or service and achieve many of the main marketing objectives behind it, but:
- What is different about viral marketing strategies from others?
- Why is it called this term?
This type of marketing is referred to as “viral” because of its rapid spread among a large segment of customers in a quick time, and the success in sending any marketing message to any segment of the audience and achieving the desired goal.
Let us explain in more detail what is meant by the language of marketing, then we can say that viral marketing is an advertising method that attracts the attention of target customers.
Viral marketing strategies send a specific marketing message to the largest possible number of potential customers at an amazing speed and in record time while motivating them to engage in immediate interaction with that message.
Let's move on to the importance of viral marketing, and ask...
What is the importance of viral marketing?
Despite the importance of e-marketing strategies and it is indispensable to activate its strategies to promote brands and the products and services they provide, word of mouth marketing between customers each other occupies an effective and excellent position and influence more than other types of modern marketing.
In light of the efforts of e-marketers and brand owners to find the latest and most effective ways to take advantage of this development, and take advantage of social media platforms to market and promote products or services they provide, viral marketing has become among the most effective means due to its many advantages such as its rapid spread and low cost.
Marketers have begun to integrate viral marketing strategies with social media marketing strategies and benefit from it being the most appropriate way to implement viral marketing strategies.
It is possible to publish attractive text or visual content for the audience to interact with and easily share with their friends, thus ensuring the achievement of all the goals of the viral marketing strategy.
However, we cannot deny the importance of viral marketing using traditional methods from before the creation of social media platforms.
Many traditional marketing campaigns were launched with this concept and achieved amazing successes among the audience, such as competition campaigns launched by Pepsi and Coca-Cola soft water companies, and they asked customers to quickly search for a specific code in the bottles as part of the conditions for success in the competition.
This causes customers to talk to each other about who found this code, and follow up with each other about how many bottles and codes they came up with in order to win the contest.
That is, in the end, the importance and secret of the success of the viral marketing strategy is to use customers as a marketing method to promote and advertise a product or service apart from the type of advertising medium used.
Thus, they begin to influence each other in a record period of time, and brands thus succeed in reaching the primary viral marketing goal, which is rapid spread, and then the rest of the marketing goals are achieved, by increasing sales rates and making more profits.
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What are the benefits of Viral Marketing?
When you activate viral marketing strategies some benefits and advantages that will accrue to your brand such as:
1. Gain more credibility with your audience
As a large number of customers continue to talk and interact about your brand's marketing campaign and recommend it to relatives and friends, a new impression begins with a new customer segment, and thus, the confidence and credibility of your brand and the products or services you offer will increase.
2. Low volume marketing cost
As we explained through the concept of promotional marketing, customers are used as a marketing tool to promote and advertise the brand and its products or services.
That is, in this way, many marketing objectives are accomplished without incurring the cost of anything other than the cost of preparing the marketing message only.
That is, there are no costs for paid advertising campaigns, or advertising campaigns with influencers or celebrities, and this makes the cost of viral marketing low compared to other marketing strategies.
3. Enhancing Brand Awareness
The more viral marketing strategies succeed in motivating customers to interact with your ad or marketing message, and the more customers talk about what your brand offers and its quality, the more awareness will be among those customers about your brand with the potential to reach a new segment that has not heard of your brand before.
4. Winning the trust and loyalty of customers
In the event that a brand carries out many advertising and marketing campaigns to urge the audience to always buy from it without making sure to build any friendly interactive relationship and gain the audience’s loyalty first, then over time customers start to form a manipulative or harsh impression of the brand.
This is unlike other brands that participate and interact with their audience through social media platforms or any other means of communication in a simple and close way, or try to increase their sales in other indirect ways, when the brand succeeds in gaining the loyalty of the audience.
Which makes him follow them permanently and interact with them and thus facilitate the success of sending any marketing message to them.
This is what promotional marketing strategies help achieve for brands, as marketing campaigns are often emotional or linked to arousing the emotion and feelings of the audience, which contributes to building deep and lasting loyalty links with customers effectively.
5. Increase the number of potential customers
Spreading the word about your brand and the products or services you offer helps increase the number of your followers and potential new customers.
A brand can reach a huge number of customers through any of the viral marketing strategies and therefore this is an excellent opportunity to generate the largest possible number of potential customers and this is really the goal of the marketing message that the campaign is communicating.
The Most Effective Types of Viral Marketing Strategies
1- Pass-along strategy
This strategy is mainly followed by civil society organizations that seek to increase their client base in order to raise a lot of donations.
This is exactly what one of the charities did, as it published an advertisement for the challenge of goodness that the artists do as they began to pass the challenge to each other, and the association asked the audience to follow the example of the artists and pass this announcement, that is, to share the challenge with relatives and friends to help the needy.
2- Emotional marketing strategy
Emotional contact with the audience is one of the most important motives that motivate him to interact with the marketing message immediately and share it with others.
Therefore, this strategy depends on arousing the feelings of customers to reach a reaction from them such as laughter, joy, tears, or even sadness and anger.
One of the most successful examples of this marketing strategy is Coca-Cola ads that carry emotional marketing messages that push a large number of people to buy bottles of Coca-Cola and share them with their close people.
3- Motivational strategy
One of the most popular types of viral marketing used by a large number of brands to facilitate customer interaction with them, which is the participation of customers for a motivational action found in the latest content published on social media, via email or through mobile phone messages.
💡 Illustrative example:
The following image is a message for the famous elmenus delivery app, it follows the motivational viral marketing strategy where the customer is asked to share this message with one of his friends to enjoy a discount of up to 50% when placing an order from the application.
4- Buzz Marketing: Viral Marketing Strategy
One of the most controversial marketing strategies, despite its amazing success, there are many who oppose its use for brand marketing.
But this does not negate the fact that a lot of this strategy is followed, which mainly depends on creating some controversy and hype to attract the attention of the public.
As a natural result of this controversy, it spreads among a large number of the audience, as the audience begins to interact with it and forward the message more than once, to more than one person.
One of the most prominent examples of this strategy is the following announcement 👇 :
This advertisement is for one of the Italian brands “Prada” famous for selling leather products such as bags, shoes, clothes, and hats, so the brand created a new product which is "the cover for covering the dead" and prepared a visual advertisement to promote it. 🙄
And we find that the advertisement has already succeeded in provoking controversy and causing a sensation among different segments of the public.
Where some disagreed and some agreed, but in the end, far from the commercial goals that the brand pursues, the advertisement succeeded in achieving its main goal, which is to quickly raise controversy among the largest possible number of customers, whether targeted or not.
Now that we know the concept of viral marketing and its most effective strategies, we should take a look at the following:
- How can your online store benefit from a viral marketing strategy?
- What are the effective ways to help you put together a professional viral marketing strategy for your online business.
How to Create an Effective Viral Marketing Campaign for Your Business
We explained earlier that the goal of viral marketing strategies is to get customers to share and interact with a marketing message very quickly in order to reach the largest possible number of customers.
This is actually what is achieved when implementing any of the viral marketing strategies.
But before this, every online marketer or online store owner should focus on the basic and strong motivation that motivates customers and encourages them to share information about your online store with other people.
That is, it is important to have an idea and impression about the needs of your customers and what requirements they are looking for, so that you provide them with them during your viral marketing strategy, and ensure the success of its goal and convince them to share the message and attract more customers to buy your product or service.
In order to succeed in this and to be able to launch an effective and professional viral marketing campaign, follow us and learn the most important following steps:
1- Understand your audience first
Before you talk to your audience and send them a request, try to understand it and the needs it seeks to satisfy.
And to succeed in creating a marketing message that is really close to them and close to their interests, since they will not share any request with you if it is not related to their interests.
Therefore, trying to understand your target customers is one of the first and basic steps that you must accomplish, to ensure that you put the right marketing message and the imperative for your customers to share it and help you achieve it.
💡 For example: do not offer offers and discounts on products that the audience is not interested in and that there is no demand by the new millennium generation in the event that it is your first target audience, but rather look for the products that they flock to buy the most
2- Determine the goal of the marketing campaign
As we explained during the Viral Marketing Benefits section, there are many marketing objectives that can be achieved when creating a marketing campaign in this concept, and although this is a positive thing and brings many advantages to the brand, it is somewhat unprofessional.
The goal of the marketing campaign must be clear and specific to be measured and tracked during or after the campaign is completed.
If your campaign aims to enhance brand awareness, gain website visits, increase sales of a product, or any other objective, many other tasks responsible for the success of the campaign will depend on it.
3- Create a marketing message that is easy to share
There is a wisdom that says in its meaning, that if you want to be obeyed, you must command what is possible, that is, make sure to prepare a clear and simple marketing message that is easy for customers to share in any way.
Do not exaggerate in preparing content that is long or difficult to understand and difficult to share through any means of communication in order to ensure the success of customer interaction with it.
The more clear and easy the CTA procedure is, the faster customers will interact with it and share it, whether it is through any of the traditional advertising media, or modern advertising means such as emails or social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
4- Provide an incentive to participate and interact
Whether you follow any type of viral marketing strategy, it is necessary to provide a large and effective incentive within the viral marketing campaigns to urge customers to interact and participate with the required action and achieve the desired goal.
5- Social media marketing
We cannot deny the importance of social media today in the success of any marketing strategy, as it has billions of users from all over the world.
It is considered one of the most powerful marketing tools that help in the success of the goal of viral marketing, in terms of the rapid spread of the marketing message and the ease of customer interaction and participation with it.
Through the personal accounts of customers via any of these platforms, it is easy for them to share any post or send it to their friends, and thus your marketing message spreads virally quickly.
This step will also help you to measure and track the success of the campaign by the number of shares or views you got for your post.
Conclusion and suggestions
During today's article, we explained that viral marketing is urging customers to share and spread the targeted marketing message about a product or service with other customers, whether they are relatives or friends.
We have dealt with more than one way to implement viral marketing strategies such as preparing attractive and influential content to succeed in spreading quickly and to be an incentive for customers to share it with others and interact with it, thus reaching the largest possible number of customers.
💡 For example: you publish an offer with a discount when you share a specific promo code with another person, and thus you guarantee the interaction of the first customer who received the ad, and the interaction of the other person who will also interact with his friend in order for both of them to benefit from the discount that you provide.
