Introduction 

Viral marketing offers small and medium sized businesses the opportunity to target a whole new set of customers while keeping distribution costs to a minimum. The key to viral marketing is to get your customers to do the hard work for you, by recommending your company or its promotional offer to their friends and colleagues, who in turn will recommend to their friends and so on. An effective viral marketing campaign can get your marketing message out to thousands of potential customers at phenomenal speeds.
This article explains the origins of viral marketing, its benefits, and outlines a number of tips that will help you implement an effective campaign.

Origins and benefits of viral marketing:

While viral marketing has its origins in the offline world – where it would have been described as ‘word of mouth’ or ‘creating a buzz’ - it is most powerful when used online. This is because a marketing message in an email, or on a website, can be seen by a potential audience of thousands, giving companies maximum exposure at a minimum of cost.

The term “viral marketing” was coined in 1997 following the rapid take up of Microsoft’s web-based email service Hotmail. By simply including the promotional link “Get your free Hotmail account” in every email sent by existing customers, Hotmail began to use customers as a low-cost distribution channel. In turn, new customers were eager to sign up to a service their friends were effectively endorsing by already using. Through viral marketing, Hotmail increased its customer base to more than 12 million in just over a year and a half.

Hotmail discovered that a personal recommendation is more powerful than any advertising campaign, and viral marketing’s strength is based on the fact that people are more likely to respond to a marketing message or take interest in a product if it comes with the endorsement of a friend.