Marketing
Issue No. 42 - August/September 2008
Successful online viral marketing
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
The latest Indiana Jones movie cost $160m to make and $140m is being spent on marketing it.
Marketing can be a very expensive activity but it doesn’t have to be. This is particularly important for SMEs whose scale usually can not carry the entry costs for conventional marketing campaigns.
However, clever online viral marketing can be an effective and relatively inexpensive alternative.
The most successful online organisations, in terms of numbers of people using their service, are those that enable people to find and interact with others. That’s what Facebook and YouTube do, for example. So, viral marketing taps into this predisposition for people to want to socialise online and share information.
Viral marketing has demonstrated its worth for many years now.
I recall that one of the budget airlines decided to make 50,000 very cheap fares available for a limited time and sent this information by email to 6000 people; within three hours all 50,000 seats had been sold!
MarketingSherpa.com announced its annual Viral Marketing Hall of Fame awards recently so let’s look at these examples and draw some lessons.
The winners were mostly well known companies like Columbia Sportswear, General Mills and Verisign but this demonstrates that online viral marketing is now very much accepted by mainstream marketers. However, some were SMEs like a small Canadian printing company. Here are some of the examples.
Pazazza Printing Company
On a shoestring budget this Canadian company created a three-and-a-half minute video to convey its love of printing and to make people laugh.
The viral marketing started by sending the video by email to the company’s contacts, a press release to industry publications, a YouTube posting and links on Facebook. The results have been 133,000 views of the video, 20 requests for copies to be shown at Conferences and the invitation to the company CEO to be a speaker at a maj...
