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Tips for running viral marketing campaigns:

An effective viral marketing campaign can generate enormous interest and create positive brand association but there is no magic formula. It requires an understanding of your customers, what motivates them, and the way a campaign should be managed and monitored.

While each viral campaign is unique, here are a few basic tips to follow:
Know your audience

The first step when implementing a viral campaign is to identify what motivates your customers. It’s worth doing some research and analyzing any existing information you have on them.

Identifying your offer

Once you’ve researched your customer base, you need to identify your offer. This is the item, message, experience, promotion or product that you include in an email or on a web page that will motivate your customers to recommend it to others. Viral marketing is most effective when you are providing your customers with something they cannot get anywhere else.

Incentives

A popular viral marketing strategy is to reward a customer for forwarding the message to a limited number of people – around three to five – with a gift token, discount or entrance into a competition.
Another technique is to give your customers a small percentage (such as 1%) of the sales price if their recommendation results in a sale. This could also move down the scale, with their friend benefiting from a smaller percentage (such as 0.5%) of the next sale, and so on.

Make it easy

Your marketing message will only spread if you make it easy for customers to recommend it. Firstly, don’t make the message or content too long or complicated and keep it simple. Make sure your email, download, logo or content is easy to replicate or transfer, such as including a “recommend this page” on the relevant web page so that users can email the page to friends.

Adopt best practice

If you are running a campaign in order to obtain customer data such as email addresses or telephone numbers for future marketing initiatives, be clear that this is your intention. While it may be tempting to use these details to send out mass email shots, it’s a sure-fire way to alienate any new customers and damage your reputation. Also, ensure your campaign complies with the anti-spam regulations, contained within the Privacy Directive, which came into force in 2003.

Monitor the campaign

Due to the very nature of viral marketing, monitoring a campaign can be difficult. If you are employing an agency to run your campaign, make sure they can deliver all the information you need before you hire them.
Metrics that you can measure include number of referrals, click-throughs, conversions and brand awareness. If possible, try and identify where customers have come from and how many click-throughs and conversions have come from each referral group. By calculating this against the cost spent on the campaign, you’ll be able to see which campaigns deliver the highest return on investment.

Be prepared

Because the aim of your campaign is to generate as many leads as possible, you must ensure you have scalability. You don’t want it to grow so big that your systems cannot cope with it, so if you are directing people back to your website, make sure you have the bandwidth to cope with any extra traffic. Similarly, if you’re offering a free trial of a product or a service, make sure you are prepared for the demand that your campaign will generate.

Summary

Viral marketing has clear benefits for small businesses looking to implement a cost-effective marketing campaign.
A campaign works best when you are providing something unique to your customers who will be compelled to recommend it on, so it’s important to spend time researching your existing customer base in order to identify the focus of your strategy.

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