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Everyone knows that, for small and medium businesses especially, visibility is critical. If people are not aware of your business, your products, or your services, there is little hope of them ordering from you. Since the companies with the lowest brand awareness are often those who have the least budget for big ad campaigns, they undoubtedly have the most to gain from lower cost ways of spreading the word. 

Viral marketing is a strategy that encourages people to pass on a message to others, theoretically creating the potential for independent growth in exposure, taking advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to a wider audience.

Viral marketing can therefore be thought of as akin to word-of-mouth marketing. Another useful analogy might be waves spreading outward from a stone dropped in a pond – as a carefully thought out viral marketing strategy should move outward from the centre extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

So why is it that some viral marketing strategies work better than others? Although there could be a number of reasons having a clear strategy is fundamental. Here are six simple elements you should try and include in your strategy. Remember that any viral marketing strategy doesn't necessarily have to contain all these elements, but the more it has, the stronger the results are likely to be.

A good viral marketing strategy should:

• Give away something (usually for free)
• Make it easy to send on to friends and colleagues
• Be able to go from small to large easily
• Tap into peoples behaviours and drives
• Use existing communication tools
• Piggyback on the resources of others

Let’s examine these in a little more detail.

1. Give it away to get something back

"Free" is a very powerful word. Most viral marketing programs give something away to attract attention. A great viral campaign is not about immediate profit, but it is about planting a seed which will start to grow and generate profits as it starts to bears fruit. ‘Free’ is a word that attracts, thus enabling visitors to see all the other things that you are selling. Viral campaigns result in valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. The message is simple - give away something to earn a sale.

2. Pass it on - and on, and on

Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic or software download. Viral marketing works on the Internet because it's instant. Simplify the message so it can be transferred easily. Brevity is best.

3. Growth is key

In order to spread the message, the delivery method must be easily scalable from small to large. This means you need to plan ahead how you can service the interest generated so be sure to include scalability into your viral strategy.

4. Understand what turns people on

A good viral marketing strategy should aim to take advantage of common motivations because it is ‘desire’ that pushes people. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. If you can create a viral marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviours for its transmission, then you have a winner.

5. People like to talk and share - so take advantage

Researchers claim that each person has a network of eight to twelve people within their immediate set of friends, family, and associates. An individual’s larger network may consist of hundreds or even thousands of people. Good networkers have always understood these relationships and the power of the internet today enables millions of people to meet on the web, interact and develop new relationships. It has never been easier to collect e-mail addresses and favourite website URLs. Learn to place your viral message into existing communications channels and you will rapidly multiply its reach and power.

6. Ride the wave and stand on the shoulders of others

The most creative viral marketing plans use resources that are already available to get their message across. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others websites and authors give away free articles or try to position their articles on other web pages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of sites and get embedded into articles seen by multitudes of readers. This means that someone else's newsprint or webpage is now pushing your marketing message. Social media websites such as ‘Facebook’, ‘Stumbleupon’ and ‘Twitter’ are used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of users per day which means they are ideal business channels for promoting your message.

Everybody’s business could benefit from a bit more visibility, so why not get in touch today to find out how we can help you to raise your profile through viral marketing.