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I really love this viral marketing ad of Heineken. Check it out!

7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing

Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it… instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing – and let your fans do all the work for you. With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it. It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

But how?

There are a lot of tricks to viral marketing. Here are 7 important ones:

1: Make people feel something

The most important trick of all is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion, to express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:

• be filled with love or hate.
• be very happy or insanely angry
• be an idiot or a genius
• be deeply compassionate or an egoistic bitch

You want people’s blood to be pumping of excitement. Forget neutral, trying to please everyone, supporting several target groups or any of the many ways to be unbiased. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.

2: Do something unexpected

This one explains itself. If you want people to notice you campaign, you have to do something different – something unexpected. Forget about trying to promote your products as just being great – everybody does that. Forget about trying to make it look cool – everyone else has “been there, done that”. Remember the bear being attacked by a man? That was unexpected – and it is one the most effective viral advertisements ever.

…and above all – never be a copycat.

3: Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)

One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share – it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage – and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you! Viral marketing is all about a good story. When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen – yet everyone remembers it.

Forget about you, your product or your company. Focus exclusively in creating a good and interesting story. Sure, you can add you product into the mix, but it must not be the most important thing.

4: Make sequels People have just seen your campaign.

They think it was interesting, unexpected and their emotions has reached a high level – you have their complete attention.

Now what do you do?

If you do like most companies you will simply do nothing… and that is a big mistake. When you got people’s attention you need to act, and one the best ways of doing that is to give them more – make sequels. This can be many things;

It can be extra movies similar in concept to the first one – like BMW Films and Nissan did.

• It can be a behind the scenes look
• Bloopers
• A blog about the process (like Nissan did)
• Extra material, goodies etc.
• …or all of the above

Never leave people standing with nothing.

BTW: Forget about countdown releases – i.e. releasing a new episode every 2 weeks. People’s attention span does not last that long. Give them everything now!

5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding´

Sharing is what viral marketing is all about. Everything you do to make that easier is going to improve your campaign. That means that you need allow people to:

• Download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.)
• Allowing them to easily embed the content on their own sites (Note: remember bandwidth issues)
• Sending it to friends, either using a link or by sending the content directly.
• Publishing it on varies social networks – Digg, YouTube etc.
• Allow people to add it the bookmarking sites
• Note: This also easily be overdone. You do not want to clutter up your page with a zillion “share me, dig this etc.” icons.

6: Connect with comments

Another important element is to connect with your audience. Remember you got their attention, they are excited and now they want talk. Comments is one of the most effective ways to do this. Keep in mind that the best viral marketing campaign is one that creates a strong emotion. This means some people will really like it – while others will get very angry. You have to accept both in your comments, and you have to welcome both opinions. But, at the same time you must prevent individuals to wage war against each other. It is not a sin to delete comments from people who attack another person, or if the comment is off-topic. But, it is a sin to delete comments from people who just have an negative opinion. And, most importantly. Connecting with people through comments means talking back. Do not add comments if you do not want to participate yourself.

7: Never restrict access!

Viral marketing is also about your campaign getting a life on its own – spreading like virus. In order to do that, in order to become “viral”, it needs to be free. Never add restrictions to the mix.

• Do not require people to register
• to become members
• to download special software
• to enter “unlock” codes
• …or to do something in order to get the right link.

Viral marketing is never about exclusivity. It is about getting it out there for everyone to see. ——————————————————————————–

There is a common message in all of these tricks. It is that you need to make it right – or not do it at all. Only the best viral marketing campaigns make it – the rest literally sucks. If you have any tips of your own, I sure would like to know about them! Also, If would very like to see any cool viral advertisement that you might know.

Other cool “virals”

The Smirnoff viral One of the first really successful viral campaigns in the “YouTube age”

Dove Evolution A true viral campaign, showing artificial beauty – and it worked!

Source: Thomas Baekdal

viral marketing

Viral marketing is a marketing method, which relies on people to personally pass along a marketing message through word of mouth or by other communications means.

Making Viral Marketing Work

Viral marketing depends on a high level of person-to-person information exchange. If this form of information distribution expands i.e. a large volume of recipients forward your message to a large number of friends, it will affect a tremendous overall growth very quickly. On the other hand, if the numbers passing the message on dwindles, the overall growth will slow dramatically.

At the peak of business to Customer (B2C) it looked as if every startup company had a viral component to its strategy, or at least claimed to have one. However,few marketing viruses enjoyed the same level of success as Hotmail, widely known as the first example of viral marketing.

The Power of Viral Marketing

A report published by the ORCI (Opinion Research Corporation International) shows that users tell an average of 12 other people about an online shopping experience. On the same token if that person has a bad experience 12 others will get to know about that as well. This is the engine that powers viral marketing.

Viral marketing has become the blueprint for Internet marketers looking to copy the success of Hotmail or ICQ. Almost everybody wants to take his or her product and “make it viral.” It’s important though that you give some thought in to what underlies viral marketing.

When talking about viral marketing, people may not realize that they’re really talking about not one but of several variations of viral marketing. Different variations of viral marketing operate for different reasons, following different mechanisms and produce different effects. However, it seems that most have the same core mechanism being that they provide the user with quality products or experiences.

Types of Viral Marketing

Value Viral

What: Information exchange about quality experiences amongst friends

How: Bill had a great experience-using product X and recommend Charlie should try it too.

Guile Viral

What: Guile Viral is people trying to forward viral marketing mails in exchange for incentives.

How: Bill tries convincing Charlie to try product X simply because Bill will get rewarded if he is successful with Charlie.

Vital Viral

What: People want to share experiences with others, which requires the use of certain other products.

How: Bill wants to share the experience he had with product X, but Charlie needs to have Product Y to do so.

Spiral Viral

What: People needing to share funny, dirty or interesting experiences with others.

How: Bill wants to share the same experiences he had as above with Charlie because he assumes Charlie might like it too.

Vile Viral

What: People warning others of the negative experiences they had.

How: Bill has a nasty experience with product X and tells Charlie not to buy it.

Advice on Viral Marketing for Marketers

Viral marketing, or “refer-a-friend,” email campaigns have attracted a lot of attention from the media recently. These campaigns persuade recipients of promotional emails to forward the messages to their friends. This type of marketing has attracted both positive and negative reviews from consumers, privacy advocates, and industry pundits

At the core of the issue are concerns over sending unsolicited email. The tactful use of viral marketing can help marketers avoid negative reactions, and gain an increased reach for a targeted marketing message beyond its original audience.

Five Ways to Execute A Viral Marketing Campaign Most Effectively

1) Offer an incentive

Viral marketing will yield its best results if a valuable and tangible incentive is offered that will entice individuals to forward an email message to their friends. However, marketers should limit the incentive to a specific quantity to avoid spam-like distribution of the message. For example, giving a 20 percent discount to any person on his or her next purchase if the message is forwarded to five friends. On the other hand an open-ended incentive, offering a $5 credit for every five friends referred, can lead to causing a marketer Customer service, financial, and privacy-related problems.

2) Don’t consider the referral as already in

When a Customer refers a friend, the referral should not be considered an opt-in. A name and email address provided by a person’s friend does not automatically make the referral a Customer. That individual should be asked if he or she is willing to receive any future viral marketing mailings. Only after winning the consent of the relevant individual can they be counted as an opt-in.

3) Personalize Your Viral Marketing Email

Response rates increase considerably when users can see that a message is coming from a friend, therefore it is best to tone your viral marketing email message to show that it’s coming from a familiar source. The subject line is the main component in a viral marketing email, because this is what helps identify the email as friendly. A good subject line may read: “ADV: Hi John, thought You’d Like 20% Off at ABC.com,” thereby identifying it as a message sent by a friend about a special offer in an advertisement.

4) Track and Analyze the Results

As with any marketing campaign, tracking the results and constant performance improvements over time are an absolute necessity in viral marketing. Viral marketers now have access to insightful and helpful data that can be used to evaluate performance. Important figures to keep track of are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers should split the click-through and conversion rates of original Customers from referrals and evaluate their performances individually. These figures will alert a marketer to which offers and Customers drive the highest ROI.

5) Continuous Promotion of Friendly Referrals

Viral Marketers who need frequent forwarding of their message should place an enticing offer in every relevant outgoing email message. Viral marketing, though ideal as a one-off campaign, can also be effectively used to continuously expand the reach of your marketing message over time.

Though there is no sure-fire way to halt negative Customer reactions, the following five concepts will help marketers make their viral marketing campaigns highly effective.

Source: Netstarter

Photo: Digitallabz