Viral Marketing - page 3

by Adrian Mullan, 3/31/2006

Ingredients of a Successful Viral Marketing Strategy

Offer an incentive - When online payment processor PayPal launched their service, they offered you a free $25 credit when you referred a friend to sign up. Offering an incentive answers that question we all have - 'what's in it for me?'.
Make it funny, entertaining or controversial - If you want your message to reach as many people as possible, it has to be catchy in some way. It has to get attention, make people laugh or generate controversy. Search engine Lycos publishes a list of entertaining email campaigns at: http://viral.lycos.co.uk/
Encourage recipients to forward your message - Once you've done the hard yards of creating your viral marketing piece, you need to encourage users to forward it via email. You need to include some form of call-to-action like 'click here to email this to your friends'. Don't rely on your users to do it of their own accord - most people respond better when they are prompted to do something.

Final Thoughts on Viral Marketing

All marketing mediums have one thing in common - they're all competing for our limited attention. Because consumers are now being bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages a day, we simply filter out a lot of conventional advertising.

Viral marketing works because it relies on a relationship between two people. When you receive a message from a friend, you're much more likely to give it attention then an unsolicited promotion (i.e. spam). Another bonus is that compared to traditional advertising, the costs of implementing a viral marketing campaign are very little and the snowball effect can be huge.

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About the author

Adrian Mullan is the author of 'The Internet Demystified' and founder of WebDummy.com - a popular Internet marketing resource for small business owners.

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