The Importance Of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing has gained major support over the past few years due to its ability to convey fun, creative messages that are unlike anything ever used for promotion in the past. In a period when media clutter, and the avoidance of it via consumer control, have become major issues for marketers, the ability to create something different and engaging provides a key potential solution. Consumers, especially from the younger generations, value authenticity and timely communication over strictly content based messages. Their attitudes towards traditional advertisements are largely negative, and they instead prefer to have a message that doesn’t come across as simply trying to sell a product. Viral marketing offers a new take on the traditional …show more content…
In the past, consumers were force fed advertisements with few ways to distinguish what worked and what didn’t in the short term. Now, social media allows a marketer the chance to see how successful their ad is within hours of their first posting. Shares, retweets, likes and generated buzz are now just as important as views, and a campaign can be broken if it cannot stimulate enough of these social media impressions. Linking back to the first factor, you must create something that is both exciting and noteworthy in order to convince consumers that your ad is worthy of sharing and spreading across the internet. Social media can provide a cheap way to spread your messages, but they need to be strong and worthy of …show more content…
I have never, and have no intention to ever, spread a brand message on social media if it does not involve something that I am physically doing. A strong example of this is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which incorporated an element that made sharing of your own videos an imperative part of the campaign. Without a factor that includes me personally, I am never going to feel comfortable bothering my friends and family by spreading a viral marketing campaign. I thoroughly enjoyed the Volvo and WestJet videos, yet I felt no desire to share them despite their immense quality. Many people within my generation have similar feelings towards their personal laws of social media sharing, which makes viral marketing particularly challenging. Certain social media platforms, such as Snapchat and Twitter, are more accepted as sharing devices, and should be more heavily favored when attempting to start a viral