Viral Marketing: Six Strategies for Success
http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/viral-principles/
In this article the author describes “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing.” The author defines viral marketing as a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others. In turn, this creates the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and ability to influence others. The author of this article provides six basic elements to creating an effective viral marketing campaign. He first begins with a discussion about how the campaign needs to give away valuable products or services. In other words, to attract attention the program must give away valuable products or services for cheap or free. Second, the program must provide for effortless transfer to others. The user should not have to sacrifice time or energy to start using the product. Third, the program must be made so that it can easily move from a small scale to a larger scale once the product begins to catch on. The program must have capacity for a large number of users. Fourth, the marketing strategy must be built on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission. Fifth, the message must be able to be communicated via existing communication networks. Last, the marketing strategy must take advantage of others’ resources. To spread the message to as many people as possible take advantage of other methods of communication that already exist i.e. an email list or a newspaper. With these strategies the author believes an effective viral marketing campaign can be accomplished.
This information is directly related to what we learned in class. We briefly discussed how the viral marketing can be extremely powerful because it conveys an implied endorsement from a friend or people you know directly instead of from a third-party. It should also be noted that the six elements described in the article agree with the discussion we had in class about how to begin a cascade of information. In one of our homework assignments we discussed how to get people to start using our product rather than an existing product. Our strategy involved lowering the price of the product below the products established price. The goal here was to attract some of the people using the other product to start using our product. Once a significant fraction of the people start using our product we can then raise the price slowly. However, we must ensure that the price of the product tis still lower than then people’s value at a difference greater than that of the competition. The first element of a viral marketing strategy in this article is to offer a valuable service at little to no cost. This strategy is effective because it will bring initial attraction so that people begin using your product.