Viral Marketing Explained

Viral marketing is an easy and affordable marketing tool which more and more finds it`s way into the marketing mix.
 
The ultimate goal of viral marketing is to gather as much people as you can to recommend your service or product to others. Providing a good service, making yourself more accessible to people and also rewarding them with incentives helps in facilitating the process. Certain streams or application types are viral in nature. They have the ability to attract people without much efforts. For example, when a gym instructor starts a discussion thread, all the peers are invited for participation too. This increases the scope of discussion and chances are that more people will drop by and actively participate. This leads to the formation of a community. These people then start recommending the thread to others who join and participate there too. Now it becomes a full grown community. It can then be used to promote products and services to people in the future and tap the entire potential.
 
Email providers succeeded by providing attractive email services to the end user and giving incentives for referrals. Many of them have a huge user base and now profit by advertising 3rd party products to this large ever growing user base.
 

Is Email viral? Not at all. How do companies manage to get such a large user base? By advertising their email service at the footer of each email sent. This prompts the receiver to sign up for the same provider as the sender. It is only after this does the individual user referral take shape. This is an indirect way of encouraging a customer to work for you. Conducting surveys helps a company understand its customers. Once a company understands what a customer needs it helps in serving them better. The real secret is holding on to such a huge user base Offering the right incentive to the customers is very important.
 
Gifting a holiday may not be really effective when compared to providing a free music player to young targeted consumers. Cash incentives are not the best alternative always. Being creative helps in the long run too. Surveys help identifying if the people really need free goods or free service. For example: An office worker would prefer grocery delivered free rather than have a discount of 5%.
 

Easing interaction with the consumer boosts company reputation. Lets take a look at an online store like Amazon. They offer a variety of items to choose from. So do other stores. In this world of competition consumers are no longer after extremely low prices, they need good customer support and something that makes them feel special.
 

So what does an internet company like Amazon do to achieve that? They make a note of user purchases and interests. They reward you for shopping with gifts on random purchases. This makes a customer feel special. Also Amazon keeps a user updated with the latest products and offers which really hooks customers to their online service. In today`s world this is a novel or trend way of winning customers, especially in internet marketing. You can find good examples for viral marketing campaigns in the marketing news.