The Importance of Viral Marketing in Launching a New Product (Blog post 3)

         The Importance of Viral Marketing in Launching a New Product

 

Viral marketing is the goal of many companies looking to leverage the social media space to promote their products. ASOS is one of these companies that could promote the new products through viral videos with partnering with different websites such as NETFLIX. There are few different ways to up the company chance to going viral on social media to promote a new product while making sure it will be spread successfully. (Olenksi,2018)

 

  1. Focus On High Quality Content Before Investing In Advertising

Content creation it is an important part of the advertising campaign. Most brands focused on advert more that content which is that makes it unsuccessful. While successful brands certainly have great marketing strategies, they also regularly put out quality content to keep customers engaged. (Scott, D.M., 2009)   https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-gb/blog/5-secrets-super-successful-video-marketing

 

  1. Know Your Audience

It is crucial to know who are our target audience are to make sure the content of the advert suit them. That is help to make a campaign spread viral.

 

  1. Partnering With Influencers

As I mentioned above partnership is one of the main key to promote the product, as soon as we recognized our audience we could start to promote through relevant partnership website such as NETFLIX or using media influencers as the there are similarities between these partners audience with ASOS.

 

  1. Get Your Content Reposted On Popular Accounts

There are a variety of social medias platform such as tweeter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to use. For example a teenage Target employee that went viral on Twitter after a picture of him was posted online. After the picture was posted, thousands of users retweeted it, and it went viral overnight.(Olenksi,2018)

 

  1. Tell A Relatable Story Through Your Content

It is important to tell a through story. Company can create a video series where they use product or feature brand throughout their life. If the audience resonates with the character, they’ll be more likely to want to associate with the brand and the new product.

 

  1. Keep It Short And To The Point

There are more people today than ever before that suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, better known as ADD. We all have way too many things to distract us in the real world let along the social media one. And then are those devices we cannot live without. Or as one very telling headline in The Telegraph put it a few years ago: Humans have shorter attention span than goldfish, thanks to smartphones (Olenksi,2018)

 

  1. Utilize Interactive Content

It is important to use the interactive content we could do that with creating a quiz in social media or including a free give away gift. A good example of The Best Digital Advertising Trends of 2018:

 

  • There are six principles of Viral marketing which can make the promote product successful (Khalid, 2019)

 

Risks/disadvantages of the viral marketing

As much as viral videos gain an increase in audience engagement, elements could be risky and conclusively unsuccessful. There area few reasons, which could make an advert, fail. (Redmond,2017)

  • Wrong audience target; it’s important to make sure targeting related audience due to the age, gender, interest etc. otherwise whole plan might goes wrong.
  • Ethical consideration, online privacy issue
  • Hard to measured,
  • Negative buzz, some times instead of receiving positive feedback on the viral advert everything might go wrong and receive the opposite; this would negatively influence the targeted business. An example of the very unsuccessful advert video. “Full Pepsi Commercial Starring Kendal Jenner”
  • https://youtu.be/uwvAgDCOdU4

Goals To the Video Marketing Strategy

Goal-setting is a crucial task for every professional and every brand; it’s what keeps the business growing and succeeding. Using the S.M.A.R.T. method to set goals is a simple, tried and true way of approaching future steps toward success. (Mc Caughey,2018) Setting Marketing Objectives and Measuring Digital Marketing:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

De Veirman, M., Cauberghe, V. and Hudders, L., 2017. Marketing through Instagram influencers: the impact of number of followers and product divergence on brand attitude. International Journal of Advertising36(5), pp.798-828.

Eckler, P. and Bolls, P., 2011. Spreading the virus: Emotional tone of viral advertising and its effect on forwarding intentions and attitudes. Journal of Interactive Advertising11(2), pp.1-11.

Khalid, l 2018 “Importance of viral marketing” [Online]Available at: http://lenakhalid.com/why-viral-marketing-is-sooo-important/ [Accessed 15 March 2019]

Mc Caughey, k 2018,” How to apply the S.M.A.R.T goals to your video marketing strategy” [Online] Available at: https://www.greyskyfilms.com/smart-goals-video-marketing-strategy/ [Accessed 15 March 2019]

Olenksi, s, 2018[Online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2018/02/06/7-ways-to-up-your-chances-of-going-viral-on-social-media/#59f8093f17af [Accessed 15 March 2019]

Redmond, J 2018 Disadvantage of viral marketing [ Online] Available at: https://business.lovetoknow.com/business-marketing-business-owner/disadvantages-viral-marketing [Accessed Feb2019]

Scott, D.M., 2009. The new rules of marketing and PR: how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons.

Assessed Blog 2: Viral video marketing

What makes viral video marketing successful?

Viral marketing campaigns technology presents opportunities for relationship building, not only peer to peer but also between marketers and their customers (Harridge-March and Quinton 2009:171) viral videos could be the best chance to express the company products from the unknown brand to a very popular one. According to the Social Media Marketing report (2018), a video is the second most popular form of social content online.

Videos are intuitively attractive, touching and highly shareable – which is ideal for anyone wishing to make an infectious contact. Now 80% of web traffic is projected to be video-based, by the end of next year, more customers are seeking out video than ever before. (Baker, 2018)

The visual elements of videos could capture the audience attention by increasing their senses. Viral videos could spread through all the media channels like the virus.

Viral contact should include: 1-Emotional 2- Practical 3-Readable 4-Powerful 5-Trustworthy (Karter,2017)

Biggest viral video campaigns include:

A Sense of Humor: most of the videos out there are funny; some of them had the most ‘likes’ because of an embarrassing act.

Topicality: keeping the target ‘current’ with viral videos is crucial.

Provocation: As 65% of audiences are visual learners, they could feel the videos further influence their understanding of a topic.

 

Success stories:

It is more successful when we know what the consumers are talking about and are interested in. To take advantage of this trend, travel company Expedia created the ‘#ThrowMeBack’ campaign, which offered customers a chance to win a holiday by posting one of their old travel photos under the hashtag. (Baker,2018)

 

 

The campaign was successful and the brand was able to measure this through these three elements.

  • Audience: engaging with a wide range of consumer demographics, gaining an expansive potential new customer base.
  • Expression: receiving different types of feedback/comments.

Another successes video was “Dollar Shave Club”

This well-known video produced in 2012 is still being viewed today, and currently has over 25 million views.

https://youtu.be/ZUG9qYTJMsI

 

The founder, Michael Dubin, does a fantastic job of bringing humor to the video, making it entertaining while at the same time presenting his brand’s personality in a very vivid way. (Lodolce, 2018)

 

How to use videos for viral marketing?

  • Audience mind goal set. By creating a persona to find out what your buyer cares about? What video do they already watch more? What new topics might grab their attention?
  • Pick the right style of video
  • Choose a platform for your performance
  • Correct right level/length in relation to optimizing engagement. Shorts and straight to the point. One fifth of your viewers
  • Emotional connection
  • Promote. It is so important to promote the video often; the video couldn’t go viral if audiences don’t know where to find them.

 

Are there any risks/disadvantages?

As much as viral videos gain an increase in audience engagement, elements could be risky and conclusively unsuccessful. There area few reasons, which could make an advert, fail. (Redmond,2017)

  • Wrong audience target; it’s important to make sure targeting related audience due to the age, gender, interest etc. otherwise whole plan might go wrong.
  • Ethical consideration, an online privacy issue
  • Hard to measured,
  • Negative buzz, sometimes instead of receiving positive feedback on the viral advert everything might go wrong and receive the opposite; this would negatively influence the targeted business.

 

 

 

References:

Baker, W 2018 Your guide to viral video marketing: An entertainment epidemic [Online] available at http://fabrikbrands.com/your-guide-to-viral-video-marketing/ [Accessed Feb 2019]

Bampo, M., Ewing, M.T., Mather, D.R., Stewart, D. and Wallace, M., 2008. The effects of the social structure of digital networks on viral marketing performance. Information systems research19(3), pp.273-290.

Carter, R 2017, How to make content go viral: Tips for truly contagious viral content

[Online] available at http://fabrikbrands.com/viral-content-and-how-to-make-content-go-viral/ [Accessed Feb 2019]

Lodolce, A, 2018 Viral video Marketing: Definition, Benefits & strategies for 2018[Online] Available at https://viewership.com/viral-video-marketing/ [Accessed Feb 2019]

Harridge March, Sally, and Quinton, Sarah, (2009), “Virtual snakes and ladders: social networks and the relationship marketing loyalty ladder,” The marketing review, vol. 9, no. 2, 171-181.

Hinz, O., Skiera, B., Barrot, C. and Becker, J.U., 2011. Seeding strategies for viral marketing: An empirical comparison. Journal of Marketing75(6), pp.55-71.

Redmond, J 2018 Disadvantage of viral marketing [ Online] Available at https://business.lovetoknow.com/business-marketing-business-owner/disadvantages-viral-marketing [Accessed Feb2019]

Trusov, M., Bucklin, R.E., and Pauwels, K., 2009. Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: findings from an internet social networking site. Journal of marketing73(5), pp.90-102.