Viral Marketing

February 12, 2009 at 5:06 pm | In 1, Advertising, Economics, Marketing, Marketing 2.0, Media 2.0, Technology | 1 Comment
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“Viral marketing is based on the belief that marketers, using traditional advertising, can no longer deliver credible messages. Only customers can!” 

Keith Bates

Viral marketing is a term used to describe the technique used to increase or to built awareness of a certain advertisement, one’s product or company through self-replicating processes. This technique is more often called “word-of-mouth marketing” because it is only you (as a company) who have to think of a way that your advertisement would encourage people to pass it along.

The term “viral marketing” is also sometimes used pejoratively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns—the use of varied kinds of astroturfing both online and offline to create the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm (wikipedia).

Viral Marketing can be applied to any organizations, whether it is profit, non-profit, B2B, consumer product/consumer services companies in order to add viral effects to advertising so that it may achieve significant results in driving traffic to one’s ads. It brings more profitability of sales and increase brand awareness for the advertiser of the ads.

Many different forms of media can be used to reach out to the public without actually promoting a product. 

According to eMarketer, the number of a total internet users who are world-of-mouth influenced by 2011 will be increased and will reach 20%.

According to Forrester Research, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is rapidly growing and expected to continue this upward trend. With an anticipated compound annual growth rate of 43%, enterprise Web 2.0 spending is expected to reach $4.6 billion globally by the year 2013. 

Enterprises use the principles that people pass a product (ebook, video or audio) to friends or family so the brand name is passed automatically, it helps to promote as the products as the company as well.

Viral marketing has became attractive as a mean of advertising due to its low cost. Email sent to a friend with information regarding the interested product will be read not like a spam with the same information. It is claimed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. Viral marketing is based on this natural human behavior.

Viral Marketing is any strategy that encourages individuals to pass to the marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence.

Advantages of Viral Marketing:

● Publicity

● Visibility/Promotion

● Drive targeted web traffic to your site

● Earn Credibility

● Link popularity

● Make backend sales 

If we look at figures of traditional marketing:

  •  Only 1/3 as effective as 10 years ago
  •  37% is wasted
  •  Redundant
  •  Pushes more people away than it attracts

Most messages today are no longer useful for  3 reasons:

1. Society has changed radically (new forms of advertising)

2. Shorten lifecycle of a product

3. Consumers are

 -More Savvy

 -More Cynical

 -More Selective

-Don’t want to be sold

Six Elements in viral marketing strategy have been identified by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant:

● Give away products or services

● Provides for effortless transfer to others

● Scales easily from small to very large

● Exploits common motivations and behaviors

● Utilizes existing communication networks

● Takes advantage of others’ resources

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.

Goals of Viral Marketing:

● Email List Development 

This is probably the big one. It is easy to integrate and you can get a lot of value in the future from your list.

● Promotion

 One of the goal of viral marketing is to make people promote your product in order to increase brand awareness.

● Branding 

If your video just went viral, you are probably not getting emails or anything. Hopefully it is strengthening your brand and getting people to go do a search on you.

● Traffic 

 Your viral marketing item may have all kinds of links back to your site for case studies, instructions, a forum for users, etc. It depends on your product.

● RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers 

If your viral item is interesting, you can encourage other people to follow your twitter or rss to find out about updates and new items.

Applying the Viral Marketing strategy, company will create a network of people visiting its website who are already interested in the company content, products, services.  

The keys to viral marketing: 

● Know your target market 

● Find something about your product, venue, service or organization which will be useful, impactful.

● Interesting and exciting and will create a good user experience. This is your ‘viral agent’. 

● Make it easy for people to refer you to others. 

● Back up your viral agent with an impactful, user-led, action-creating, well-targeted website. 

● Follow up with ways of making it easy for existing customers to refer you online to others. 

With good website design, good customer benefits and products and strong embedded calls to action, company has the opportunity to convert a good percentage of its new visitors into customers. 

The value of viral marketing is that it increases your exposure to interested potential customers and you can have as many different viral promotions/ campaign as you have different types of customers and their needs. 

Is the print media in danger ?

November 12, 2007 at 4:53 pm | In Advertising, Changes, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
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Two important news items came out last week with Google’s announcement that it will provide free access to news feeds distributed by the news agencies feeding the print media.

The announcement is doubly important with the study by the Washington Post demonstrating that the classified ads market took nearly $3 billion in revenue from the press in 2006. In terms of advertising, it is even more flagrant; advertising budgets invested in the Internet will overtake those invested in the press and rise to €45 billion ($62 billion) in 2011.

“We are on the brink of a major change across the media horizon, influenced by technological changes, user habits and business advertising strategies” commented James Rutherfurd.

This information will only reinforce the questions that perpetuate in large press group board rooms. How to stop the flight of advertising investments and how to save one of the finest professions in the world “journalism”?

It is surely too late. When Facebook, Google and Youtube were born, press owners shunned the Internet, concentrating on the internationalization of their publications for free, thinking that it would be the winning strategy.

Unless the press regroups to offer qualitative advertising space on a European or worldwide scale with a single, self service advertising platform. At least engaging in a strategy of forced acquisitions of Web 2.0 companies with strong traffic like Dailymotion, Netvibes, Facebook, Twitter, etc…The press does not have very many exit options, which Rupert Murdoch and others have understood for a long time.

Record volume of acquisitions in 2007

November 12, 2007 at 4:48 pm | In Advertising, Innovation, Venture Capital | Leave a Comment
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This graph represents the evolution of M&A operations since 2002 in the advertising and online marketing field. An important acceleration can be observed since 2005 to reach a peak in 2007, when we’re only in the middle of the year.


Click to enlarge

Concerning recent investments in this field in Europe, after ADS-click in Geneva was given a 4 million $ financing by Baytech Venture in March 2007, it’s now Openads’ turn to receive 5 million $ from Index Venture and Mangrove. (Openads is based in London).

The future of online advertising, like the NASDAQ !

November 12, 2007 at 4:41 pm | In Advertising, Marketing 2.0 | Leave a Comment
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Like on the NASDAQ, or on a stock market, online advertising will trade on electronic markets in all available formats, from mobile to video, including sponsored links. Marketplaces are getting their “investments” ready to take the best places on a market estimated at over B100$ in 2009.

Today, Adbrite, Rightmedia, Ads-Click, Quigo, Adify, Turn, Wunderloop are getting ready to conquer these markets, whose progressions are huge.

Who will defy GoogleClick?
Google is behind in this field, stuck in the opaque Adwords and Adsense model which dates back to 2002. The online advertising giant has just bought Doubleclick, just as the company has announced the near release of an Ad exchanges technology. The sign of a fundamental strategic swerve for the search engine which aims to become a universal marketplace.

Another sign of the times, Yahoo wants to stay in touch by investing in Rightmedia, while in parallel launching Panama, a platform inherited from Overture.

Ad Exchanges

November 12, 2007 at 4:34 pm | In Advertising | Leave a Comment
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Before and after the announcement on the possible acquisition of Doubleclick by Google, many articles talked about “Ad exchanges”:

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Read/Write Web

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GigaOM

What are Ad exchanges?
It is a network where advertisers and publishers are put in direct relationship via auctions on spaces or keywords. Like on eBay, buyers and sellers can see the best prices.

Example: a publisher supplied by the Adsense advertisement flux cannot decide on the price of keywords or spaces on his site. With Ads-click, it’s possible; a vertical portal will be able to set a higher CPC price depending on his audience which is more qualified. Today, Google and the other ad networks ignore these parameters.

The logic of the Ad exchanges concept is a network entirely managed by all the sector’s actors, publishers, advertisers and SEM companies unlike the current networks such as Google, Yahoo or Miva who are controlled by their owners. It is therefore a transparent network which is being built around the world’s oldest values, supply and demand, thereby creating the future’s marketplaces.

Mark Kingdon, CEO of Organic, Inc.’s interview on the subject by Om
Extract:

Om: If you look beyond today, how does this acqusition help Google? Does this buy them time, as the advertising industry tries and figure out its future models?

Mark: Advertisers buy what they know and they innovate on the edge so Google is expanding its relationships and market coverage. Everything that’s happening on the edge is having a gut-wrenching impact on the big middle. Think about YouTube and its impact on big media. Business models are slow to change when billions of dollars are at stake.

Om: Both Google and DoubleClick are moving ahead and setting up ad-exchanges. Are they a key component to this deal?

Mark: TBD. It sounds like an obvious direction for Google to take. Add in real- or near-real time optimization across different digital media and you have a mouth-watering concept. Everything from commodities to collectibles are sold on exchanges so why not ads? Here’s why: there is a big business built on the buying and selling of ad space. It comfortable, familiar and very profitable for the participants.

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