The big difference between viral marketing and mass marketing is that it is the consumers that assure the indirect promotion of a product in viral mode.
In mass marketing, millions are invested in TV spots, full page ads in newspapers and radio spots which may be seen or heard but have little chance of being passed on by consumers. These actions are substantial and repeated to consumers who are not sensitive to or can even be bothered by this type of publicity.
Viral marketing is the power to have an effect on consumers by gaining their interesting in everything except the product that you are promoting. Viral marketing does not show the product, but rather suggests it, without looking to sell. Viral marketing is free from limits, accepted without restraint or difficulty by consumers and is practiced essentially by the proliferation of videos on networks like youtoube or dailymotion in Europe.
The three virtues are: everyone would like to discover the video spot, everyone would like to share it, and everyone would like to talk about it.
This efficient mechanic is 1000 times more powerful that the best traditional advertising campaigns and clearly shows the advertising trends of the future.
Here are a few guidelines for businesses to make successful viral marketing campaigns with video support:
1 – Touch the public with scenes that are comical, amusing or impressive. The scenes must not in any way make reference to the product, this is a fundamental error. Provocative videos with opposing emotions like love or hate, strength or weakness, create reactions and conversations.
2 – Pay attention to the endings, that is, how are you going to make viewers laugh or cry in 2 seconds at the end of the spot with an ending that no one is expecting.
3 – Don’t use stars or top models in the cast, don’t try to demonstrate that your product is better than another, and don’t try to sell a product with a dream, somehow “think different”.
4- Forget your company and its marketing organization written in marble, forget your personal opinion, forget that you have invested millions to create the best product. Focus on the virality of your realisation. The best known example today is the Dove commercial that cost $50,000 and was seen more than 1.7 million times more that a commercial shown during a superbowl final, 75 seconds that brought tremendous notoriety to Dove:
and Macarena for Heineken :
5- Don’t limit access to your information, make all video formats available, create links to share, and send the source URL of your video to be able to track the effects. Diffuse on youtube and all the sites that propose the same kind of service. Publish all text information in RSS mode and make it visible on DIGG, Delicious or Technorati.
6- You have made a successful viral marketing campaign! Don’t stay inactive now, don’t lose the advantages gained, plan a blog, viral actions like cash back operations, commit yourself to a second wave to maintain the passion that was born from the first buzz.
Like all change, and this one is radical, it’s necessary to set limits. For several months or years to come, all consumers are not on the Internet and it will be useful to produce mass marketing, but the Internet and mobile phone will take more and more market share and I bet that in 2015, 95% of advertising budgets will be invested in online marketing.
