In today’s video and article we will explore viral
advertising marketing and why it is so powerful.

Viral marketing is the new marketing and advertising
trend right now, especially in the online scene. It
takes advantage of the internet’s network effect to
be able to reach a great number of people in such a
short time.

Benefits of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing strategies offer several advantages
to businesses.

- Easy to execute. There are several methods of
sending viral contents or messages and all of them
are easy to do. Among those methods are sending
email, instant messaging, and using web sites.
Sending viral messages through these media will not
take much effort and time.

- Low-cost. As compared to sending direct mails,
viral marketing proves to be cheaper and a more
cost-effective method. With just a little investment
on viral advertising, its power can reach even
hundreds of thousands of people as compared to
spending the same amount of money to traditional
advertising methods. That is because the only money
to spend is for sending the initial set of viral
contents, then forwarding or replicating the message
will not require additional costs anymore.

- Good targeting. With viral marketing, there is a
huge probability that the message will reach people
that are interested in it. Since the concept of
viral marketing is essentially passing on a message
from a user to another person, most likely, the user
will pass it to a person whom he knows will be
interested in it. Thus, the percentage of wasted
advertising, which is sending the message to the
wrong market, will be reduced.

- High and rapid response rate. Since viral
marketing reaches a good number of the business’
target market, there is also a big possibility to
have a high turnover ratio. Even if the responses
will not immediately convert into profits, there
will still be huge traffic that the business will
receive which is what most web owners want.

These are indeed great benefits a business can get
by adopting this marketing technique. But what
really makes it more powerful than other marketing
or advertising strategies?

Let us take the example of Hotmail, where this
viral marketing term really started. Hotmail was
able to spread over the internet at an amazing
rate. It is like an epidemic that quickly spreads
out to others once there is a single person
infected by the virus. That is why this technique
was named as such.

According to Hotmail’s statistics, its number of
subscribers grew from zero to twelve million users
in just 18 months. Imagine that! What’s more
amazing is that the company spent just $50,000 on
advertising to achieve that number of subscribers.
Compare that to Juno which spent $20 million on
traditional advertising during the same time
period as Hotmail but got much less output.

With those facts about Hotmail, viral marketing’s
main strength is indeed reaching a huge number of
the target market at a considerably low cost.
Hotmail did not even have marketing or advertising
presence in most countries outside the United
States but it got to be the major email service
provider in these places like India and Sweden.

What adds more power to viral marketing is the
fact that the viral message passed on is like an
endorsement from a friend or somebody who can be
trusted. People have this way of thinking that
“if my friend uses this product and is happy
about it, what stops me from using it as well?”

In Hotmail’s case, when those people who received
an email from their friends, relatives, or
colleagues using Hotmail learned that it works
and their friend is a user, they quickly signed
up and became members as well. These people
wanted to belong in this group where their friends
are also in. This technique is also a matter of
association or affiliation.

Hotmail’s case is not an isolated one, though.
During the same time that Hotmail is gaining its
popularity, so does ICQ. ICQ is like a buddy list
and instant messenger, much like MSN and Yahoo
Messenger now. ICQ also used the same technique
and marketing campaign and it gained almost the
same number of subscribers as Hotmail within the
same time frame.

Viral marketing is indeed one powerful tool to
increase popularity of a product or service.
However, just like any other things, proper use
of the technique is necessary. A single mistake
of misuse of it may mean permanent damage to the
product or service being promoted.

Best Wishes,

Paul Gallion
Marketing Strategies Group

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