Viral marketing can include sending of entertaining (hilarious) short, advertising videos clips in MPEG or QuickTime or WMA format sent peer to peer as email attachments.
Viral marketing has much more persuasion than advertising videos force feed from TV.
Entertaining short advertising videos clips have a "cool" factor which is used as incentive to spread emails from "influencers" (friends, associates, webmasters) like wildfire. Viral marketing delivers MASSIVE visits to websites. Viral marketing reinforces brand marketing with more bang per marketing buck than other marketing media.
A Viral Marketing Campaign Can be Seeded by:
Emailing a short entertaining video clip to influential people such as webmasters, leaders of network marketing organisations or community groups, or people who like to know the latest (technology, fashion etc) eg software beta testers AND who are information sharing type of people.
Placement of short video clips on popular influential web sites for downloading and users sending them to friends for entertainment or information value.
How Does a Viral Marketing Campaign Work?
Just like any subtle branding. Display of products / product or service logos such as product placement in full length movies reinforces the brand, so it is in video clips forwarded round the net. You know the story tons of rice resulting from doubling on each square of a chess set. Well it's no different with viral marketing. 4 send to 8 to 16 etc.
Is Viral Marketing Trackable?
Yes we can track how many times a clip is played but questionable is why bother. How or why bother to measure how much brand recognition stuck in a person's mind is questionable. Just tell the bean counters that delivery via email is a lot cheaper than TV ads or product placement in movies.
Investment Cost of Viral Marketing Campaigns
There are two components to viral marketing:
Digital video production costs of the video. If the video already exists for other media such as TV, it should be inexpensive (approx. $300) to convert the video to a small data size. If a digital video production crew needs to be involved, video production investment can be between $2,000 to $90,000 or alternatively digital video production training can be provided to low budget viral marketers.
Email with or without a marketing message and links to opt-in willing recipients such as close friends. AND
Email attachment of the video clip with promotion of the brand either overtly or subtly.
Download Examples of Video Clip Creatives used to create "Buzz" with peer to peer viral marketing
Warning: Adult male humour. 1mb
Bird Ka. Boosted sales of Fords a run out model car. Now if you save and send this video clip to at least two of your sicko friends you would be starting viral marketing to promote Ford's branding of their "Ka"
Tooheys Beer TV video clip converted to WMV format for viral marketing via the internet.
