Five Factors to Consider When Developing a Viral Marketing Campaign

Viral marketing is defined as, ‘using consumer communication as a means of multiplying a brand’s popularity through customers spreading the brand name of a product or name of a company’. (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004)

As part of my study at the University of Brighton I have been tasked with developing a new digital marketing strategy for a company of my choice. While developing this viral marketing campaign I came across a study by Woerdl et al (2008) that cited four strengths of viral marketing and presented five key factors to consider when developing a viral marketing campaign.

Four strengths of viral marketing are;

v  Low Cost

v  High Reach

v  Ability to Integrated Marketing Communications

v  High Diffusion Speed

These strengths make viral marketing an incredibly exciting proposition for any business, if you are thinking about implementing a viral marketing strategy for your business; consider these five points below to ensure maximum (ROI) return on investment.

Key factors to consider are,

1.       Structure of the campaign - Ask yourself the following questions?

Does it encourage viral activity? Does your campaign encourage people to share the message? Encouraging people to share your message is a key success factor in a viral marketing campaign, the higher proportion of people encouraged to share your message will result in improved campaign reach and higher ROI.

2.       Product or service characteristics – Ask yourself the following questions?

Is the product or service suitable for viral marketing? Can it be passed on easily? Your product or service needs to be suitable for viral marketing; if the product falls down here it could spell in the campaigns failure.

3.       Message content – Ask yourself the following question?

Is the message fun, engaging, easy to use? Does your campaign engage the recipient; the viral concept needs to be designed carefully to make sure it engages the maximum amount of people. Creating a competition to win a prize may be a good way of engaging your audience doing this.

4.       Peer to peer information conduit – Ask yourself the following questions?

What channel does it use? Can it be passed on easily? It is paramount that the recipient is able to pass this message on easily and quickly, a long process will result in the campaigns failure. Advice here would be to use email. Email forwarding is one of the most straight forward things to use for you and your recipient, it also takes no development by your or your business and it’s free.

5.       Diffusion characteristics – Ask yourself the following question?

Does the message spread quickly? Can the recipient see what message is trying to be communicated quickly and effectively, if this is possible it is likely to positively affect the campaign.  

Click here to read the full Woerdl study - http://kar.kent.ac.uk/25586/

References

Hennig‐Thurau, T., Gwinner, K. P., Walsh, G., & Gremler, D. D. (2004). Electronic word‐of‐mouth via consumer‐opinion platforms: What motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the Internet?. Journal of interactive marketing, 18(1), 38-52.

Woerdl et al, (2008) Internet-Induced Marketing Techniques: Critical Factors in Viral Marketing Campaigns. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management, 3 (1). pp. 35-45. ISSN 1753-0296.