What Is Viral Marketing?
When you purchased an item or availed of a service of a certain establishment and are satisfied with what you got, don’t you recommend that to a friend? And when you give your recommendation, doesn’t your friend buy or avail of it as well?
More often than not, we express our satisfaction with some product or service by telling our friends and relatives about our experience. Some of them will actually try the same product or service that we recommended. Essentially, we have just successfully advertised the product through word-of-mouth without the establishment having to spend a penny on it.
That is the idea behind viral marketing. Viral marketing is an advertising strategy that entices people to pass on a marketing message to their relatives and friends. It is called as such because of its similarity to an epidemic that easily spreads out, with an exponential growth, once an individual gets “infected.”
How did this marketing phenomenon start?
The concept of viral marketing, which is passing along a message, has been around for a long time now, even for centuries. There was just no specific name for it until 1997 when Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, came up with the term
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Image by toprankonlinemarketing via Flickr
Viral marketing has definitely gained its popularity over the global network. More and more businesses are adopting this marketing strategy to gain their fair share in the market. The approach developed by Hotmail in increasing its number of subscribers is one classic example of viral marketing.
How Hotmail Did It
Hotmail is one of the first web-based email provider that gives away email addresses for free. Their marketing approach starts by giving free web-based email addresses and additional services. Each of the messages sent with a Hotmail address has an advertisement at the bottom that goes: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.”
Then, of course, Hotmail subscribers will use the service to send messages to their friends and colleagues. These friends and colleagues will get the message and read it, and then clicks on the link at the bottom. They will also sign up and be a subscriber like what the sender did. Then these new subscribers will also email their own set of friends. The cycle goes on and on.
This is why viral marketing has the power of reaching thousands, even millions, of people in such a short time and with little effort from the one
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