Chapter 6: Viral Marketing
When it comes to internet marketing, it seems that there are plenty of methods or ways of marketing that can be considered as internet marketing, such as using Google Adwords as our digital advertisement, paying some blogs to write good reviews on our products, and so on. However, there is a relatively new form of internet marketing that is quite popular these days. This new form of internet marketing is called viral marketing.
Now, this is quite funny. The name viral marketing is derived from the word virus. Viral is the adjective form of the noun virus. It uses the adjective form because it explains how the marketing works. In other words, viral marketing is a form of marketing that spreads fast like a virus. Once the information spreads, there will be nothing that can stop it to reach the other side of the world.
From that, it can already be concluded that viral marketing is a very effective way of marketing. It is because one of the main purposes of a marketing activity is to let as many people as possible know our products. Once they know the products, those who think that they need the products will surely buy them. To put it simple, viral marketing is like a gossip, meaning that it is another kind of word of mouth marketing. However, viral marketing harnesses the advanced internet technology these days, making it able to reach even the farthest people around the world. That is why it is very useful to be applied by many companies to advertise their products using this method if they want their products well-known by people around the world.
From that explanation, we can conclude that there are many advantages of viral marketing, such as the information you want to spread can spread very fast and wide, it is relatively cheap and simple, and everyone can apply viral marketing. Well, as for the cost that is cheap, it is quite interesting because budget is very sensitive in business. It can be very cheap because an viral marketer only needs to say or post something a bit provocative and other netizens will pass on the information voluntarily without even knowing that they are participating in promoting the products. So, it can be concluded that viral marketing is a new form of internet marketing that can work fast and well with relatively cheap cost. There is nothing better in this world than something that works best with cheapest price.
Unfortunately, viral marketing doesn’t come without any weaknesses.. So, the weaknesses of viral marketing include the need for a trigger that will make our post or our advertisement viral and the difficulty of analyzing the result that will come our post becomes viral. As for the trigger to make the post become viral, it is the hardest part in viral marketing. A viral marketer has to think hard to find the point that can be used as a trigger in the post to make it viral. Usually, the triggers used are hot issues that are related to the products that are being marketed using viral marketing. That way, many people will be aware of the post and share it without hesitation.