Viral marketing is the great white hope of the advertising industry. It promises to deliver all those things that advertising folk like to talk about…
- It’s interactive
- It’s involving
- It’s digital
This is all just so much ‘blah blah’. Viral marketing is an over-hyped tool that has promised much and delivered little in the real world. How many truly successful viral marketing campaigns have you seen?
Yes, there are plenty of things that have gone viral. But they’re not marketing anything. They’re fun. A bit of frippery to distract and amuse. They achieve nothing more.
To be successful as a marketing tool, a viral campaign must achieve a marketing result. It has to deliver eyeballs, sales and/or brand/product awareness. If it can’t achieve any of these objectives, it’s a complete and utter waste of time and money from the perspective of the one paying for it.
To go viral, a campaign must be easy to spread. If it requires anything even remotely difficult or time-consuming, it won’t spread beyond the first generation of people who receive it. This has implications for viral products that require downloading and installing. In most industries, this would kill a viral campaign right then and there.
It makes much more sense for most industries to instead build a web-based viral campaign that doesn’t require downloading, and instead runs instantly in a browser.
UK sex-toy retailer Electric LadyLounge has produced a viral marketing campaign based on a quiz format. The viral tests one’s knowledge of sex-toys. The quiz page loads immediately, and takes around 90 seconds to complete.
The results are displayed, and it’s a bit of a giggle. Even better, you can see how other people did, including the person who sent you the quiz.
This is something you might send on to your friends if they enjoy having a laugh. Electric LadyLounge make it clear that you and your friends can see each other’s results. This provides a social motivation to spread the virus.
The company goes one step further, and offers to enter you in a prize draw each time you send the quiz on to a friend. This is a smart step, although the prize isn’t all that exciting in and of itself. But then, it probably doesn’t need to be in this case. It merely adds a little spice to mix.
There is a built-in form that allows you to send a ‘personal’ invitation to your friends by supplying minimal data. This makes it reasonably easy to spread the ‘virus’, but only to one person at a time. And after supplying 3 pieces of data (firstname, lastname and email address).
It could be even easier to send this out. If the quiz was integrated with Facebook it would be possible to share it with all one’s Facebook friends with a single click.
In my view, a viral marketing campaign will only succeed if 3 criteria are met. You can read about them here.
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Great article Wayne. I’ve often looked at viral marketing, and wondered whether it could work in my business. But I’ve never been able to see why anyone would spread a virus that promoted my services. You’ve confirmed my own thoughts about viral marketing. I don’t think it’s for everybody. (Fun quiz tho).
Hi Wayne, I’m interested to know what role you see viral marketing campaigns playing in marketing in the future?
And how do you convince your clients, who usually use more traditional forms of marketing, that a viral marketing campaign will provide value?
I don’t attempt to convince clients about viral marketing as such. If the client’s business suits a viral approach, I get the client excited about the application behind it. For example…
If the application helps a person work out what they should have for breakfast (and what could be more useful and exciting than that
), I ask the client if s/he would like to have it spread automatically and for free. Job done.
I’ve been working in the field of internet/affiliate marketing for some years now (not as long as the so called “gurus”), and I’ve found it to be enjoyable as well as challenging with a hint of fickleness, but I’d certainly vouch for it, for those who are in between minds about marketing online. Anyway, excellent post, I picked up a few things as a result of it, cheers.
It is true that viral marketing is really amusing at first glance. but we are not really sure if people who clicked on those ads really started visiting the site. for me once I got redirected to a site after clicking the ads, I just closed it without looking into the site itself.
Sorry for the huge post, but I’m really loving it, and hope this, as well as the excellent post some other people have written, will help you decide if it’s the right choice for you.
An excellent point. As in all marketing – viral marketing is ever only successful when it provides something its target market actually wants/needs.
So far viral marketing looks annoying to me. even popups are just all around that includes adds that somehow makes me click it. I see that it has gone through very well to others I think.