The term viral marketing was coined in 1996 by Jeffrey F.
Rayport.
It was defined as a strategy that emboldens people to disseminate marketing message to others, which results to an exponential growth in the publicity and influence of the message.
Viral marketing stems from internet marketing.
Viral advertising aims at targeting its listeners and onlookers more precisely.
So, in principle, viral advertising contrasts conventional advertising methods in that rather than trying to propagate a message through an old-style satiety tactic like the billboards you see in highways with brands posted all over it, it publicizes itself through linkages and networks of associates, acquaintances, friends and enthusiasts sharing mutual interests.
Viral marketing and advertising utilize current social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, being two of the most famous social networking sites to escalate product consciousness, dispersing through a group of individuals like that of a computer virus.
Like that virus, it spreads from one individual to another transmitting it to many other individuals.
Viral marketing takes advantage of this inherent behavior to quickly spread a message.
When a viral campaign is spread as broadly as probable and is met and accepted positively, that is when it becomes effective.
Microsoft's Hotmail for instance, managed to have 12 million subscribers in just 18 months! How did they go about their viral campaign? They simply added a short promotional message to emails which were sent to their users.
How genius was that? And to think, during those times, internet use was not as extensive as it is today.
The fundamental key to viral advertising consequently lies in effectively targeting smaller numbers of persuasive individuals who have the standing and influences to spread the message.
Accordingly, one of the pronounced benefits of a viral campaign is that it does not necessitate the same level of investment of money unlike the conventional methods which is more costly.
Viral marketing is the new marketing and publicizing fashion today, especially to those businesses that are online by nature.
It takes advantage of the social media and other internet social sites to advertise and reach people in just a little amount of time.
Here are the 4 Reasons Viral Marketing is beneficial to businesses.
1.
It doesn't involve a huge amount of funds.
Viral marketing is cheaper than the usual advertising and marketing strategies.
Given a little investment, the return could be an overwhelming number of people who similarly advertises the company.
The money spent is usually invested on the initial contents, and since replicating the content and forwarding it does not need additional cost, you are likely to save more money for your company's advertising.
2.
Good sense of target.
The aim of viral marketing is to spread the message to targets which in turn will forward it to other equally interested and active people.
And since this is the concept of viral marketing, there is little percentage of futile and fruitless advertising.
3.
Easy to implement and achieve.
Viral marketing is a strategy that is very easy to do.
There are a lot of ways to make your advertisement viral, you can send messages and emails with viral contents and it spread like an actual virus.
Plus, doing these doesn't take that too much time to complete.
4.
Great and Rapid Response Percentage.
Since viral marketing is able to reach a big number of markets, there is a huge probability that a high turnover percentage could also be expected.