What is Viral Marketing?

"Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence."

I am using a simple example to explain how viral marketing works effectively.

Consider when you check your email, you see a mail from a friend which is a buy one get one free e-coupon offered by Levi's, you will always open it because of your trusting relationship with your friend. When you choose to forward this message to the other friends, you have already endorsed it and given credibility to Levi's product.

In this way, you become a brand advocate every time you transfer the message to others and the others will do the same to his own social network. Like viruses, the message will be replicated rapidly and reached thousands of people.


Key Points:
1.Viral marketing is a new way to reach your target audience.
2.For viral marketing to work, you must understand what will motivate your target audience to pass on a message to someone with similar interests.
3.Viral marketing is word-of-mouth marketing via a digital platform that can spread exponentially.

Source:The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing" by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Source:"Viral Marketing:Get your audience to do your marketing for you" by Russell Goldsmith

Successful Case Study: IKEA Facebook Viral Marketing

IKEA has run a very successful viral marketing campaign using Facebook to promote its new store opening in Sweden.

Due to having a limited budget, the advertising team of IKEA decided to use Facebook to promote the IKEA store and aim to spread the message not just throughout Sweden, but throughout Europe.

The team have chosen the most popular function of Facebook, “tagging pictures”, and used it to promote IKEA showroom products. After creating a Facebook profile for their Store Manager, the advertising team uploaded 12 pictures of IKEA showrooms to his photo album.

They encouraged the Facebook users to tag the products they saw in the photos. Whoever was first to tag a product, for example, a bed or a sofa, won it as a prize. It became very popular among the users visiting the profile to tag pictures and begging for more pictures to be uploaded to win more products.

As the demand grew, people were adding pictures of IKEA products in their Facebook pages and spreading them among friends all over the place, the online advertising campaign had evolved beyond its initial expectation and gone truly viral.

The IKEA viral ad is a perfect demonstration of how to encourage a community, and getting that community to advertise for you, rather than advertising at them, can lead to excellent results.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TYy_3786bo
Source: http://viralmarketing4290.blogspot.com

If you are interested to read more viral marketing cases, please visit my teammates' blogs below.

Cadbury Eyebrows written by EL Lai
Lady Gaga written by Wallace Cheng
Mcdonald written by Celia Chan
Windows 7 written by Wallace Fung

Advantages and Disadvantage of Viral Marketing

Taking the example of IKEA Facebook Showroom, the main advantage of using Facebook to create viral marketing buzz is that its message can reach a larger number of Facebook users within seconds in a cost-effective way.

The vital of successful viral marketing is that messages are forwarded on to friends, family and social group who know the sender. Unlike junk mail, the receivers are happy to receive and forward any message among their friends. The positive word-of-mouth will allows marketers to tap into the community’s existing networks and spread not only the marketing message but also increase their purchase intention.

The main disadvantage is that IKEA limited their marketing communications through the social networks of Facebook only. I believe some of their target audience and brand loyalists are not the Facebook users yet, they definitely miss out the opportunities to reach them.

The other problem is that IKEA cannot control the users’ comment posted at Facebook, it can be either positive appraisal or negative sentiment about their company.

Source:http://viralmarketing4290.blogspot.com