Today’s era is the era of social media. It is an integral part of everyone’s life whether you are a student, a professional, a housewife, a creator, a businessman. Everyday significant time is being spent on social media and millions and millions of messages are shared through it.
So, in today’s world, if you want everyone to know about something, you have the power of exponential distribution at a very fast rate just like the spread of a virus. This is the origin for the word “viral”. It is being used in different contexts and one of them is marketing. If you want your product or service to be known to everyone so that you have a lot of customers to try your product and/or service and make your business successful, you have the option to use viral marketing which uses all kinds of social media platforms like that WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and many others.
Today’s competition requires every business to think about whether their product or service needs virality or not and plan the viral marketing accordingly. There are many ways to do viral marketing like creating text messages which can be shared easily by everyone on different platforms, audio-visual creatives which can be very rich and interactive also, full-fledged game which are very engaging and can be addictive.
Since viral marketing is very personal, the individuals themselves are equivalent of publishing channels in traditional marketing. The individuals who have the highest potential for making the content viral are said to have high social network potential.
According to researchers in viral marketing, there are six key factors that drive virality and they can be represented using STEPPS acronym which stands for Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value and Stories. Due to its high potential to reach millions of users without significant investment, viral marketing is used to reduce marketing cost and efforts.
Written by – Ritu Singh (Intern)