What Viral Marketing Adds To The Mix

Sep
23

The concept of marketing is simple enough. Marketing is the
systematic planning, implementation and control of a mix of
business activities intended to bring together buyers and
sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer
of products or services.

Viral marketing adds to that mix promoting your product or
service in a manner that catches current and prospective
buyers up in the promotion process, allowing them to
become part of your marketing engine, with your promotion
being exciting or entertaining enough to drive them to
actively participate in getting your message across to still
more prospects.

For any advertising campaign to be successful, remember to
focus on the seven Ps (as discussed previously) and budget
and understand both the total costs associated with your
advertising as well as the returns you are seeing from it.

It goes without saying of course that no matter how great
your product or service, if people don’t know about it they
can’t take advantage of it; but at what cost point can you
afford to make them aware?

If you have a low-return product that has limited sales you
may not have very much money with which to spread the
word and traditional methods may seem too expensive.

Just to reiterate a few of the more common
“standard” advertising avenues, let’s list them
below:

1. Newspaper ads
2. The Yellow Pages and other telephone directories
3. Merchandising such as leaflets, packaging, shelf
displays and window displays
4. Trade journals
5. Websites

These are very common but costly ways to advertise.
Viral marketing many times relies on some aspect of these
existing tools. However, when you start a campaign, it’s vital
for you to know the start-up and long-term costs, and this
includes the expense of directing the marketing efforts and
of support overhead.