VIRAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN SHOULD HAVE VIRAL DELIVERY

Viral delivery is critical in viral marketing campaigns.

Viral can be word of mouth delivered and enhanced online to reach a large number of people in a short term. Just like a flu virus in humans, viral marketing replicates and propagates itself online. Nowadays, many companies use YouTube, Facebook, MySpace groups to enhance awareness of their brand and can effectively market their product or service using the Internet. Online social networking offers an ideal communication environment to spread the word and take viral marketing to the success.

Let’s talk a viral marketing campaign - Wal-Mart’s Facebook Presence targets students well. This is an viral marketing campaign example using online social networking site to reach their specific target audience.

Wal-mart launched a Facebook group targeting college students getting ready to going back to school. There are links to a supply checklist and links that go back to walmart.com’s music, green shopping area, and information about its new “site to store” service. Also, the killer “app” on the site is available. This is a Roommate Style Match Quiz which asks questions such as, “What is your favorite way to study?” and “If your life were a movie, what genre would it be?” If you took the quiz and it turns out you are a “Brain-Stormer”.

Most importantly, Wal-mart understands Facebook groups are sizable audience for marketers to pursue and the interactive, social nature. The Style Match Quiz not only enables you to take the quiz, but you can also post it to your profile and send it to friends. Thus, through viral marketing, Wal-Mart is able to spread the word about its business quickly and in a cost-effective manner.

Articles in Reuters: Wal-Mart using Facebook to win back-to-school sales:
http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSN0843464220070809?feedType=RSS

Wal-Mart: Back-to-College Campagins Photos in flickr:

VIRAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN SHOULD HAVE MEDIUMS

Viral mediums are one of the key components in viral marketing campaigns.
Most viral mediums include video clips, images, interactive games, and even text, can help express and share the idea quickly.

For example, if pictures are worth a thousand words, communicating a message through image or video might allow people to share and download the message all around world.

Let’s see the Barack Obama presidential campaign of 2008 brilliantly used social networking sites to deliver its messages to tens of millions of people across the United States. In this viral marketing campaign, the messages were “Hope” and “Change we can believe in”. The viral mediums can take many forms: the “HOPE” poster, official Barack Obama Web site, (containing policy papers, blogs, tax savings calculator, event information, and so on), and videos.

Barack Obama has implemented viral marketing techniques throughout his site. Barack Obama use different viral mediums such as video, articles, poster to convey the message to reach a tremendous number of target audience.

Link to Barack Obama Video: “Yes We Can”


Link to Barack Obama Web site:
http://www.barackobama.com/

Link to Barack Obama “Hope” poster:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/2238959127/

WHY USE VIRAL MARKETING?

While people are flooded by tones of marketing messages every day or even every seconds in their life through different media channels like billboards, signage, TV ads, interruptive online ads, etc, they have learned how to absorb or skip them.

Consumers are more involved than ever before in controlling communications and message delivery at a global level. Many brands are finally realizing that the most powerful of selling is not through marketer-to-consumer but consumer-to-consumer, it enters to viral marketing.

Unlike traditional ‘top-down’ marketer-to-consumer techniques, viral marketing focuses on personal experience of the brand and taps into the new power of the consumer. One of the reasons consumers find viral marketing campaigns appealing is because the campaigns tend to be non-interruptive and enable them to choose to interact proactively with a communication or not, rather than be passively dictated to. This ‘bottom-up’ approach respects that the consumer is in control; viral marketing campaigns are ultimately driven by consumers themselves.

The result of this user-driven process is ultimately very valuable exponential brand endorsement by influencers and consumers – if the campaign is successful. No business can afford to maintain constant mainstream media brand awareness. So less expensive online media routes and the possibility of peer-to-peer-driven spread whereby the audience effectively becomes another free media channel is very attractive to brands.

WORD OF MOUTH AND VIRAL MARKETING

Marketing agency use trial sampling program to create a word of mouth in the market, through distribute the product to the target user to increase the public awareness.
In fact, after the experience of the user, they willing to share their experience on the forum, it creates a viral marketing effect.

So, the word of mouth marketing promotions have a high relation with the viral marketing.

CREDITABILITY OF VIRAL MARKETING

In 20 century, consumer behavior have total change because of the education level and technique in nowadays. Become more informative and active consumer, that is not easy to motivate to make purchase.
Consumer seeking many different information and opinion on-line before they make purchase, for example, they like to visit the web-site, checking the opinion from different forum or some share group, therefore on-line marketing already is a very importance marketing platform for distribute the information and promote the products.

In here, I would like to tell my experience to you all, I think it must let you think about the credibility of the Viral Marketing.

2 Years before, I worked in a marketing agency, I had to promote one web-site to the student to increase their the rate and exposure in Hong Kong market.
The web-site have a lot of functions, also is the most popular web-site in H.K., the part of the web-site they were going to promote is about their share platform function.

The main purpose of the promotion is to let the student thinks that, they can get and share a lot of useful information in this web-site, This is the most popular website in Hong Kong.

And the target group is 16 -19 yrs old student.

Basie on these enquiry, I had an idea - " Share my mock paper"
During the month before the A-Level started, I collected all subject of the mock exam paper from 10 different secondary schools and post it by our staff, we pretend is the user, we post the mock paper, answer the paper and give many positive comment on the web-site by using over 100 different user account.

The number of users has been increased obviously. We found that there are many users leave their comments and exam papers on the site after the promotion.

According to this real cases, it can let you think of the credibility in on-line world.

Question Time:
What is that web-site in this case?
(Right answer for gift, 10 quotas only)

VIRAL CHANNEL - FACEBOOK

"Bye! Chat with you on Facebook!"
"Leave me a message on Facebook!"
"I will upload photos on Facebook and tagged you."
"Did you watch the Youtube on Facebook?"
You can hear the word "Facebook" in every where in every second.

"Facebook" is like air, you need to live with it. If you don’t have "Facebook" or you even don’t know what is "Facebook", I am sure you are not living on the earth. In nowadays, if people don’t have "Facebook", they will die soon.

"Facebook" is a free access social networking website. People can join networks to connect and interact with others in different countries. You can find your old friends or even your kindergarten schoolmates in "Facebook". Of course, you are welcome to make any new friends over the world.

"Facebook"is not only the king of social networking but also viral marketing.

Facebook's chef operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, "You want to target everyone? We can give you that, our core focus is on demand generation - on knowing who you are and showing things that will interest you."

Link to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Interview:


"Facebook" can be used as online advertising to promote products and enhance brand positioning. Whatever you wrote, whatever you uploaded or whatever you posted will spread out within 1 second. All your friends will share your things through "Facebook".

VIRAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN SHOULD HAVE VIRAL MESSAGE

What comes to mind when you hear or see the term Viral Marketing? A virus?

The power of viral marketing is substantial, as the value of your campaign can increase exponentially.

In viral marketing campaigns, one of the most important components is viral message.

With viral marketing, marketers want their viral message to get passed on. For this type of viral marketing to be successful, marketers have to start with great content that recipients will want to share with others. The most important element of all messages is to create a very strong emotion and good storytelling. The more touching the video, the bigger the audience it will attract. Then, your viral marketing campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and start to spread like a virus.

Viral marketing is all about a good story and emotions. Viral marketing will only be successful if the viral message is good enough or valuable enough to be passed along.

Let’s see Korea Lotte’s 2% bottled water video!
Lotte company uploaded the 2% bottled water video to the YouTube site.
The main ingredient of the video was not the bottled water, but the story. YouTube viewers started to email the video to friends and embed it in their blogs. Through viral marketing, the video was viewed more than 100,000 times. Many were deeply touched by this very successful viral and interactive campaign which should have help raised the 2% branding tremendously.

Link to Korea Lotte’s 2% bottled video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJiKkworQ_c


Link to viral marketing campaign:
http://danzarrella.com/examples-of-viral-marketing-campaigns.html