The possibilities of viral marketing in advertising

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By now, you've probably heard from friends, acquaintances, or even strangers about some content on the internet that you immediately search for yourself.

A video, a picture, a game, an interesting status... All of this can appear quietly, harmlessly, as something that attracts the attention of a narrow group of people, but due to the interestingness of the content itself, it can spread " by word of mouth " from the users who saw it to a much wider circle of people, even to millions. This is exactly how viral content is created, which viral marketing uses for its goals.

Viral marketing
The very name " viral " indicates an infection that spreads whatsapp number example through the global network, infecting a large number of people. Because this type of marketing is marketing in which consumers transmit information to each other, or spread information about products or services among themselves, it is said to be the perfect type of marketing. This also means that the consumer is no longer just a passive observer, someone who listens to the monologues of advertisers, but actually actively participates with his behavior in creating the environment in which he exists and acquires an increasingly important role. When deciding to satisfy his needs and solve his problems, the consumer no longer listens to advertisers. He will listen to the recommendation of a friend, relative, close person, but even other unknown persons, precisely because of the personality and peculiarity that the recommendation of another individual carries.

digital marketing

With the development of the Internet and its popularity, there are more and more examples of viral marketing and the creation of viral content. The most popular of them is certainly the musical hit by South Korean singer Psy, Gagnam Style, which became globally popular with over two and a half billion views on YouTube and millions of views of various parodies and other recordings that were motivated by the original song. In addition, this global hit inspired an entire industry of products that were created based on the video for the song itself, starting from key chains and toys, all the way to clothing. In addition to this example, famous are the viral campaigns of the company Procter & Gamble for the brand Old Spice, the company Red Bull for the organization of the event "Space Jump" by Felix Baumgartner, the company Volvo with the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, but also dozens of others that managed to attract millions of people to inform themselves about existing brands in this way.

Viral marketing itself, as a type of marketing based on audience activity, is extremely difficult to control and can therefore often go in an unplanned direction, even in a negative direction for the companies that advertise. Thus, there are frequent examples of marketing campaigns that mock the audience, while creating a large amount of content inspired by the original campaigns, which overall has a generally undesirable impact on the brand itself.

For content to reach unprecedented proportions and "infect" millions of people, it must have several characteristics:

Interestingness. The content must be relevant, significant, and new.
Integrity. It implies truthfulness, consistency, precision, accuracy.
However, the criteria also depend on the type of content that needs to go viral. For written content, it is enough to meet the two criteria listed above, but videos, interactive content, images, infographics, must meet two more criteria:

Form. Refers to the aesthetics, structure, and appearance of the content being shared.
Functionality. It represents a necessary element of content, requiring simplicity, usefulness, usability and convenience.
With advantages such as low prices, high reach, high credibility, accountability, high speed, ease of use and the ability to reach a global audience, viral marketing is becoming an attractive option for marketers who focus on the Internet. With the increased use of the global network and the widespread diffusion of Internet services such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others, there is an increasing trend for viral marketing to be accepted by companies as their promotional mix in the future. However, given the difficulties that viral marketing entails, which primarily refers to the fact that it depends solely on how much it attracts the attention of the audience, its use in planned marketing campaigns will depend primarily on the expressed imagination of marketers and their gift for intriguing an audience that is becoming less sensitive to sensations over time.