Blog 1: Viral Marketing

Introduction

Viral marketing has been growing speedily over the last decade with the increasing dramatically of social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Viral marketing is used based on social networks for spreading the messages which are including email, blog, video, advertising, web forums, or word of mouth. Additionally, Petrescu, (2014) stated that viral marketing is a “virus” this is because marketing information gets blowout just like a virus from people who decides to share it with their friends on social networks. Currently, the researchers have indicated that roughly 5.3 trillion display as shown online each year, 400 million tweet sent daily, 144,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day. And 4.75 billion of Facebook posts shared daily (Petrescu, 2014). Viral marketing is an effective marketing tool for both large and small organizations or businesses. Especially, it more attractive to small companies, because, it might be cheaper cost and more influences than traditional marketing as using TV, radio or print ads ("Viral Marketing | What is Viral Marketing?", 2012).  Viral marketing supports companies improve their brand image and reach massive of audiences and customers with low cost by based on the concept of motivating the audience to share the message on their network for exploring the potential message vastly and efficiently (Petrescu, 2014).

Literature Review

For contributing successful viral marketing is to connect to consumers’ emotion. This is because, Huynh (2016) stated that, Emotional connection plays an important role to let the viral marketing messages as video, pictures, and articles to be spread like a virus. Emotion can be divided into positive and negative feeling. For example, if consumers see the viral marketing content is entertaining and exciting, so it will lead consumers to have the positive feeling toward the content and willing to share it with other peoples, it also increases company’s brand image. In contrast, if consumers have negative emotions about the ads, it would impact badly forward to the companies. Additionally, Viral marketing ads cannot spread of “go viral” without meeting the audiences’ sharing threshold, this is because audiences are a fundamental factor who are deciding to share the messages or not. Therefore, when the consumers’ threshold is met, they will spread the messages quickly. As a result, to lead the viral marketing covering successfully, there is relevance need to be considered as a meaning of viral, humor, visual impact or interesting content, interactivity and peer to peer recommendations (Brandon, Isme, & M Meral, 2014). Moreover, when audiences are trusting and like a company so that viral marketing will be spread and “go viral.” The reason is consumers are empowering over viral marketing messages.

Conclusion and Implications

Viral marketing can be used by small firms for creating a brand image and market share. Also, large organizations also can use it as operating buzz, increasing sales or reposition the companies’ marketing strategy (Brandon, Isme, & M Meral, 2014). Many successful companies focus developing on humour, content, and interactivity for viral marketing ads to reach consumers’ emotion for motivating them to share the messages. Moreover, according to Brandon, Isme, & M Meral, (2014) with powerful viral messages will lead the consumers to see the business as a friendly company which leads the business to appear more trustworthy. As a result, trustworthiness may result in increasing company’s brand reputation and consumers’ loyalty. However, every marketing has two sides as advantages and disadvantage. If viral marketing campaigns are not done properly, it will lead to backfire and create negative buzz. Consequently, Marketers need to identify the target market and focus on developing viral marketing campaign contents as entertaining, interesting and impressing that will influence people in an emotional way and they also willing to spread the messages to the crowd (Huynh, 2016). 

References:

Brandon, R., Isme, A., & M Meral, A. (2014). VIRAL MARKETING: TECHNIQUES AND IMPLEMENTATION (1st ed.). Arden: Jordan Whitney Enterprises, Inc. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.ecu.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1645742216?accountid=10675

Huynh, K. (2016). Factors Affecting the Success of Viral Marketing An Affective – Cognitive- Behavioral Process. Business And Management Research, 5(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/bmr.v5n1p40

Petrescu, M. (2014). Viral marketing and social networks (1st ed.). New York: Business Expert Press.

Viral Marketing | What is Viral Marketing?. (2012). Marketing-schools.org. Retrieved 18 May 2017, from http://www.marketing-schools.org/types-of-marketing/viral-marketing.html