How Does Viral Marketing Work?

Viral marketing is an online marketing technique that uses consumers’ social networks to increase brand interaction, sales, and brand awareness. Viral marketing strategies rely on individuals, who typically are influential and well-connected, to pass on the marketing message to others; as this happens, the message “spreads” – much like a virus – to broader and broader circles of consumers in the networks of each recipient. This process can also be thought of as a social cascading. Leveraging networks in this way creates the potential for the message to be dispersed very rapidly and to large numbers of people.

So, how does viral marketing work differently than offline marketing? In traditional marketing, word-of-mouth was the primary vehicle for spreading a viral marketing message; however, the Internet has enabled marketers to take advantage of broader networks. Online, viral marketing also includes the idea of a “shareable asset,” such as a game, widget, software, or another item, that can be passed on easily to others. And the actual asset that gets shared is important: to be successful, the marketing campaign and the asset that gets passed along needs to be appealing, useful, unique, and provide instant gratification to its recipients.

How does viral marketing work in social networks? One word: trust. Trust is a critical component of online viral marketing for both recipients and marketers. In a social network, the person who passes a viral campaign to you may or may not be someone you know personally. You need to trust that the item they refer you to is something that will meet your criteria for attractiveness, utility, and uniqueness, and will be safe. Likewise, marketers cannot tightly control the messaging that gets passed on by individuals with the marketing campaign. If the campaign is successful, that messaging will usually be positive, but there’s always a chance for negative comments to accompany it. Additionally, the rewards of viral marketing campaigns may not happen for some time after the actual campaign. A successful viral marketing campaign will create immediate buzz, but a growth in actual sales may not occur in the same timeframe.

Gather.com, a social network for the over-30 crowd, has used techniques of viral marketing to help companies leverage social interactions on the site to promote and create groundswell around their products and brands. If you’ve been asking yourself, “how does viral marketing work?” and “how can my company benefit from viral marketing in a social network?,” consider the campaign that Hallmark ran on Gather. To draw awareness to the Hallmark brand around Valentine’s Day, Hallmark offered unique profile backgrounds to members, and let them pass on branded Valentine greetings to one another. Influencers started sharing the greetings with their networks of friends, and soon the Hallmark presence was visible throughout the site. Also check out these case studies that describe viral engagement marketing campaigns Gather has created for other partners.

Gather.com is the leader in implementing successful engagement marketing campaigns. For more information about starting your engagement campaign, contact sales@gatherinc.com.