Viral marketing is about creating interest and potential purchases of a brand quickly and from person to person. Today, social media is the area par excellence for this type of marketing, such as viral YouTube videos that are then broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or other networks.
Advantages of viral marketing
Although viral marketing runs the risk of not being able to control a negative situation, the advantages are many more:
- Low cost- what characterises viral campaigns is that the user does much of the work, which greatly reduces the costs of dissemination, as there is no need to buy ads or media space.
- Great potential reach: A viral video on the Internet can reach a large international audience without the need for financial investment or additional effort on our part.
- It helps to build the brand: If we get it right with a very good strategy, we will be creating such incredible content that users will choose to share it and in this way become personally linked to the brand.
- Multidiffusion: On the web there is a wide variety of ways to promote and diffuse, from creating a fan page on Instagram to posting a video online on any social network, to Facebook contests.
- Quality of impact: The receiver of the message participates actively, so their attitude is positive, unlike the passivity of other more traditional types of advertising, blogs..
- High interaction on social networks: As the content is liked, it is shared, but it is also commented on and recommended. This is a sure way to get to the top of the recommended content, so the process goes on and on.
- Audience segmentation: Segmentation is also applied in viral marketing and is in fact very good for reaching certain types of audience. Even actions that involve user participation allow you to collect information that can be used to segment your target audience according to the criteria you deem appropriate.
5 examples of viral marketing
- Estrella Damm's little things. The brand's adverts are known for welcoming the summer every year and have already become a tradition in Spain. For example, the 2016 spot went viral when it told the story of an actor who had to take a break from work for 4 days due to an incident during filming. A tourist guide becomes his companion and, with her, the actor learns that the best thing in life is to enjoy the little things. This ends up being the motto of the short film. At the moment the advert already has more than 6.5 million views.
- Apple-Apple music: When Apple launched its music service, it teamed up with international celebrities such as Taylor Swift to advertise it. In the most famous video, the singer appears performing an everyday action with a bit of humour, something that makes the user feel a bit more identified. The marketing campaign went viral and accumulated millions of views. And it is thanks to the cooperation between a big company such as Apple and a famous person that something like this is achieved.
- Samsung and Iberia. The phone brand gave away 200 Galaxy Note8, valued at 1100 each, to 200 passengers on an Iberia flight, specifically IB514 from A Coruña to Madrid. With this initiative, the Korean brand wanted to clean up the bad corporate image of its previous Galaxy Note 7 model, which had to be withdrawn from the market and was strictly prohibited on board commercial flights due to the danger of internal combustion. The hashtag #Note8Abordo quickly became a trend on Twitter, thanks in part to many of the 200 passengers who tweeted about the surprise.
- "I love Laura" is considered one of the first great viral marketing campaigns. The Happiness, a fictitious Spanish musical group formed by two boys and two girls, became famous in 2006 with their song "Amo a Laura", a song in favour of sexual abstinence that became a real hit. The song was actually born as a result of an advertising campaign by Tiempo BBDO for MTV Spain, a channel that arrived in Spain at that time and achieved an incredible visibility with a very high impact. It was 2006 and the song made one of the usual routes in this type of viral marketing campaigns, it became popular through YouTube and different Spanish blogs from where it even reached the mass media both written and audiovisual.
- Popeye's chicken sandwich. Another example of viral marketing is that of the Popeye brand and its chicken sandwich. In 2019 it announced that it was launching its first chicken sandwich, which was the result of a great deal of research and which was finally being offered as something different. The company, which has a track record of over forty years in the fast food market, did not have to make much effort to achieve visibility. It was enough to keep selling this new ingredient on its menu for 15 days and then stop making it. Soon, millions of users on social networks were talking about the dish, sharing photos and demanding its return. The company, which already had plenty of visibility, even surpassed McDonalds and Burger King in terms of sales.
The success of viral and inbound marketing depends on analysing the market and finding the available gap in order to achieve the goal, but it also depends on luck. Whatever service or product you offer, you can achieve real brand awareness with this technique.
