Vi­ral Mar­ket­ing De­f­i­n­i­tion; What Is It And Why Is It Called Viral?

The vi­ral mar­ket­ing de­f­i­n­i­tion in its eas­i­est form is to de­fine it as ‘dig­i­tal’ word-of-mouth ad­ver­tis­ing. The idea is to get YOUR mar­ket­ing mes­sage spread around like a ‘virus’. You send a vi­ral mes­sage out and when­ever peo­ple ‘meet’ on­line in com­mu­ni­ties or via fo­rums or blogs they talk to oth­ers about it and make it known all over the internet.

If it works out - boom! You’ll see a traf­fic surge on your web site like never before.

Would­n’t you like that?

By de­f­i­n­i­tion, with vi­ral mar­ket­ing you ‘in­fect’ a few peo­ple with some­thing that’s worth­while shar­ing. Then they spread it around (for you) when they meet their pears.

The im­por­tant phrase here is ‘worth­while sharing’.People must have a rea­son to spread your message.

When you de­fine your vi­ral cam­paign you must pay the ut­most at­ten­tion to cre­at­ing some­thing peo­ple are ex­cited about. That is: some­thing of high value or some­thing that’s highly en­ter­tain­ing.

If they like it they start send­ing it around. Or maybe you cre­ated it so that they have a ben­e­fit from pass­ing it to their friends.

It’s best when they are so ex­cited that they pass it around even if they have no ben­e­fit at all. But here are a few ex­am­ple ben­e­fits of shar­ing your vi­ral con­tent. It’s called ‘Bribery’ :-)

  • they get money,
  • or re­ward points,
  • or free products,
  • or what­ever.

Their friends then vi­rally for­ward it to more and more of their friends.

You can imag­ine it like cir­cles around cir­cles that get larger and larger. 

  1. You are in the cen­ter. You start send­ing your vi­ral mes­sage to the small­est in­ner cir­cle of peo­ple that you have di­rect con­tact to.
  2. Then they pass it to peo­ple in an outer cir­cle, the sec­ond cir­cle, you don’t even know.
  3. Then it’s passed to the third cir­cle of peo­ple and so on.

At amaz­ing speed the num­ber of peo­ple who see your vi­ral mar­ket­ing mes­sage gets larger and larger.

Of course there are much more tech­ni­cal vi­ral mar­ket­ing de­f­i­n­i­tions, but the im­por­tant thing is not the tech­ni­cal Mumbo Jumbo. The im­por­tant thing is: once you send it out, it dis­trib­utes fast and wide with­out you lift­ing a fin­ger. In the short­est time you reach tons and tons of people.

In the end it’s your plea­sure to turn your vi­ral traf­fic into sales and cash.