Categories: Viral Marketing News
Date: 13,06,08
Title: Consumers love this type marketing
Consumers are like trout in an over fished stream – more savvy and wary and less likely to bite on just any ad thrown their way. But one new marketing trick is getting their attention where popup ads, spam in the inbox and sponsored search links have failed.
Advertisers are finding that viral marketing is the key to keeping costs down and returns high. With less money spent on traditional advertising and more energy spent on coming up with creative ways to engage consumers in the process of spreading the news about products, viral marketing is changing the advertising scene.
Wikipedia explains that viral marketing refers to, “marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.”
But what that means is that viral marketing simply taps into the psyche of the consumer on a different level. Unbeknownst to the consumer viral marketing creates the sense that the consumer has the power over the product. Rather than feeling bombarded by ads, the consumer actually becomes part of the ad campaign themselves and passes the information along to others without feeling pressured into buying the product because of a pushy advertising effort.
True, viral marketing is more passive when compared to traditional advertising techniques, but that’s the brilliance in it. The consumer is fed information from another consumer and not from the higher powers that have a product to push. Feeling included in this way brings the customer closer to the product and produces a more engaged and committed purchaser.
Less can often yield more and viral marketing is the perfect example of this concept, particularly when a vague ad campaign gets consumers talking and buying more than an overt one.
Several years ago for instance, Peerflix a peer-to-peer network for movies, launched a successful viral marketing campaign by creating an online game that made fun of celebrities.
Consumers became players who were photographers that had to take pictures of celebrities, paparazzi style. The number of players was phenomenal. Peerflix was able to attract almost two million unique visitors to the game, 5% of which they converted to users on their general site. Not only that, Peerflix received media attention for the game from Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com. The game related to their brand in theme and was fun, hence a great draw for potential customers. It went, as the phrase goes – viral.
That’s the idea behind viral marketing. Create a buzz among consumers with a catchy campaign idea and then sit back and watch as word about your product or service spreads like a cold virus in a crowded auditorium. When the campaign works, you won’t even have to pay for network commercial time because the news outlets, radio stations, blogs, and others will be talking about your product or business on their own. Advertising doesn’t get any more affordable than that.
Another successful viral campaign was Warner Brothers online viral marketing campaign for their movie, The Dark Knight. Warner Brothers coded only a single graphic on their homepage. There was no information with the graphic but when visitors clicked on it the graphic linked them to another page and another graphic. Clicking on that image took visitors to yet another image where they were promised access to more information by signing up and entering their email address. Once they registered to the site they received an email with a code.
As visitors entered their code one single pixel was removed from the solid graphic image. But because only one pixel per consumer was removed there was a lot of incentive to get as many other folks signing up so collectively they could reveal what was under the graphic. It was a great way to spread the word about the move and keep viewers engaged. Warner Brothers was able to attract interested visitors without having to reach out to them directly.
If you’re not quite that creative, don’t worry. There are viral agencies devoted specifically to helping your online business and plenty of ideas out there that can be adapted for your use. And while the financial cost of a campaign is low, the creative cost is high. It takes a combination of creative thinking, knowing your demographic and offering up something that provides just enough information so your potential customers want to know more themselves and are driven to pass along that knowledge to their friends. So next time you catch yourself feeling compelled to do just that – stop and think about it. You may just be part of a viral marketing campaign yourself. So spread the word. It’s catching.