Articles

Viral Marketing

24th July 2006

What is Viral Marketing (Virals)?

Virals are funny video clips, text messages, interactive games, pictures or even websites themselves, which are sent to your customers who then pass them onto other people - a form of technological word-of-mouth selling.

Why does Viral Marketing (Virals) work?

Virals have recently become a serious part of advertising and marketing. Relatively cheap to produce, they can be highly effective, staying around for a long time and travelling across the country and even abroad. People love funny links and email attachments. We all get them from our friends every day and often people are glad to be distracted from work. If the attachment is good, we tend to send it on to our friends, especially if it contains humour, incentives, horror, nostalgia or, indeed, sex.

Elaborations example of a Viral Marketing campaign:

Virals increase brand awareness. They can be used to launch a new product or service or as ongoing promotion. For singer, Blash, elaborations created a viral game to promote his world cup song for the Iran football team.

The Game: People choose a football player to try and score as many points as possible by shooting at the goal. The player continues to shoot at the goal while Blash's song 'Iran Barande Mishe' is played in the background. Your time is up when the song finishes and your total score indicated how many goals you scored and how fast.

Incentive: Top five highest scoring players win prizes. First place wins an Iran Football shirt signed by Blash and the next four win his album in digital format.

The Link: The game has a link to his site, there's a link from his site to the game and he has emailed all his fans and friends to distribute the game as widely as possible.

Result: It spread to more than 6000 people in just three weeks. Increasing awareness of Blash's music and increasing sales of his album.

Anything can go viral:

The key to virals is that they originate from a source you trust - your friends. If a viral is forwarded to you from your friend, you automatically tend to be receptive and if a friend sends it to you, you're already anticipating some sort of entertainment. Virals make people feel they are not being sold anything but at the same time increasing brand awareness using a non-intrusive technique.

The idea or content of the viral is the key to its success:

Without a great idea the viral will stop - ie. People won't forward it to their friends. That means it needs to be relevant to your target audience and it needs to have entertainment value. Some of the best commercial virals have some sort of competition, game or prize attached.

Other important factors in making it work:

In order to be effective it must be easy to open and easy to share with friends. It's common-sense that it should use a popular media format - it's no good only making it available to open using a rare software which no one has. You must also make sure that the file size should be as small as possible, people don't like to wait to open attachments or video clips. And then, you need to ensure as many people as possible see it - so it needs to be emailed to friends and mailing lists. Then you just wait for it to take off!

Why use elaborations?

We have a proven track record of creating virals that work and deliver increased profits for our clients. We understand your target market and work hard to create bespoke games and virals that engage your customers. At elaborations you can trust us to deliver, now and in the future.