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| Page: Definition Viral Advertising |
Viral Advertising:
Viral Advertising means that a product, service, website etc. is made known through already existing social networks, i.e. people who know and communicate to other people and spread the message to them. The concept is that the marketing efforts start small by making a product known to one or a small number of people. Every of them then passes it along to several people he knows etc. in analogy to a medical or a computer virus which also multiplies in a similar way leading to an exponential growth rate.
The term Viral Advertising
or Viral Marketing was actually coined in the mid 90s to
describe a marketing campaign invented by Hotmail.com to
rapidly expand its customer base. There might have been viral
campaigns and similar marketing efforts before but this Hotmail
campaign has the reputation to be the first.
What Hotmail did was simple. They just added a link
to their “Join Now for
Free” page to every email sent by Hotmail users and their
number grew from a few hundred to over 20.000 within 2
weeks.
Other examples would be giving away a free ebook with one’s
affiliate
links and giving every reader
the right to pass it along to his friends. Another
popular Viral Marketing strategy is to add a
“Tell-a-Friend”-button on a website.
The advantages of well done Viral Advertising are immense. To name a few:
It is cost-effective.
The response will grow exponentially with time.
One of the biggest advantages is that the promotion will not be seen as spam, because it was send by a known person.
[Viral comes from Latin virus = poison, sap of
plants, slimy liquid;
Advertisement goes back to Latin advertere = to pay attention to]
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