Viral Marketing: Cheap and It Works!
Entering the 21st century, humans now live in a wired world. Every aspect of a person’s life is somehow connected to fast-evolving technology and the great information highway called the Internet. One can work from home via telecommute, check investments with a few clicks, purchase goods from online stores, and even apply for fast cash loans with no paper documents to fax. Indeed, this may be the best time to build wealth and make a profit from connectivity. Many are taking advantage of fast internet, like broadbands, its easy and available access, like free WiFi zones, and the easy-to-set-up webspaces to do online retailing, trading, and marketing.
There’s a range of products and services sold and bought online by millions of Internet users. Success stories have been heard as well as disastrous failures in taking on online-based businesses and jobs. The difference between success and failure in any business—whether offering a product or a service—is the marketing strategy.Viral marketing, or word-of-mouth, is the perfect strategy to use online. Whenever people receive a good comment or recommendation about a product or service from their family and friends, they are most likely to try it for themselves.When customers like a certain product or service, they would tell an average of 10 friends about it, as market research shows.Customers can also tell their family and friends about products and services they don’t like. They would also tell other people about what they didn’t like about a product or service, thus, making it harder to sell the product and get repeat customers.
That’s why, blogs and other social networking websites are becoming powerful marketing and selling venues since the strategy directly or indirectly utilized here is a potent one, that is, viral marketing. According to marketing gurus, there are five most common types of viral marketing: pass-along, buzz marketing, a user-managed database, incentive viral, and undercover marketing. Many websites became successful using the pass-along technique. One of the first success stories is Hotmail.com. It used an effective tagline attached to every email sent: “Get your free, private email at www.hotmail.com”. People went to their site and signed up since it was free and the registration took only a few minutes. Nowadays, even websites that offer payday advances use one-liners to advertise their fast and efficient services.
Starting a viral marketing campaign need not be as expensive as the traditional marketing done by established companies.