Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message. Viral marketing is extremely powerful and promotes word-of-mouth or electronic message dissemination between individuals.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your website and company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using gossips to make them more popular.

Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”? I remember when all you heard about was the Blair Witch Project movies release. It was every where and everyone was talking about it. Months before it even came out. All from viral marketing. The movie was popular way before it came out and made millions of dollars!

How can you use Viral Marketing to your benefit? There are many ways in which a small business can put viral marketing to work.

An easy way to gain viral marketing exposure, is to add a “forward to friend” button in your newsletters. If your newsletter has good content or good sales, ect., people will send it to their friends! When friends send emails, people open them and read them. This offers a huge amount of exposure for your business.

Another great example is to create an ebook that your potential clients or customers would enjoy reading. You can offer it free to anyone who joins your mailing list or even offer it for free to any website visitor. Use the ebook to promote yourself, your products or services to potential customers and clients. (if you do not know how to create an ebook, check out our ebook software review)

You could also offer the ebook to others to use as give aways to their visitors. Before you know it, the ebook could be in the hands of 100’s or 1000’s.

Think of ways you can use viral marketing to grow your business online and put it to work!

For those of you who have used viral marketing in your business, what have you done? Send me some feedback!

For those of you who have never tried viral marketing, do you think it could help you grow your business and what ideas do yo have?