Viral marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies that uses existing social networks to increase brand, product or service awareness. This marketing technique depends on individuals rather than traditional campaigns to pass along a marketing message to others.
It is a frequently used marketing strategy that has earned popularity in a short period due to various reasons, like it’s easy and quite affordable to execute a marketing campaign, get good targeting and have an incredibly rapid response rate.
The types of viral marketing are stated below:
Pass-along
It is the most common and crudest type of viral marketing, because it encourages users to pass message to others. Basically, this strategy tries to form a chain by placing a message at the bottom of the email which prompts the readers to forward this message to others.
Many religious communities and commercial organizations use this strategy. They promise some miracle in your life if you pass the email to 10 others. The success of this technique relies on how interesting, exciting or believable the message is. Emails bearing short, funny clips of video, or pictures are spontaneously passed to others.
Incentivized viral
This type of viral marketing is used by most organizations in which they offer a gift or a reward for either passing a message along or providing someone else’s address. In short, it calls the user to take action in order to be awarded. A customer base grows like this. This method can greatly increase referrals, and becomes most effective when the offer requires another person to take action.
Edgy Gossip/Buzz marketing
This type of viral marketing helps business get the attention of the public. This strategy involves ads or messages that create controversies that lead to gossip or a topic of discussion. For example: an actor leaking controversial or private information just before a new movie is released.
Gossip spreads like wildfire; incredibly fast from one person to another and often to another corner of the globe, too. Build a strategy that can create some controversy to become hot gossip, and spread it from one corner of the country to the other.
Undercover marketing
Undercover marketing includes a viral message that just appears to be a cool or unusual page, activity or piece of news, without any provocation to link or forward it to others. This is something that doesn’t seem like anything is being marketed. That is the way the message gets passed – innocently to other people in a quiet way.
User-Managed Database
This organized form of viral marketing involves having users invite others to join their communities. In this method, users create and manage their own list of contacts through a database given by an online service provider. By doing this, they create a viral, self-propagating chain of contacts that grows naturally and encourages others to sign up, as well.
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