Three Pillars of Viral Marketing – Are You Missing Any of Them?
Any viral campaign needs three pillars to be built upon: an anchor, a carrier, and a payload. Have you heard about them? No? Read on.
Just in case, you’ve never heard of viral campaigns either. What is it?
Viral marketing is pretty much an old fashioned word of mouth, that is, any form of marketing, when people pass your message (including your offer) to each other on their own without you around. One of older (and somewhat special) forms of viral marketing is MLM, but that’s not the only one. iPod and iPhone gained popularity mostly through viral marketing based on popularity and exclusivity. Similar strategy was used for the Starbucks coffee. Hotmail won a lot of customers through a form of viral marketing, by including a signature “I am using free email service from Hotmail!” in every email sent using it. Each Hotmail customer was “infecting” everybody in his address book by simply sending them their own mails.
Sometimes viral marketing works in an unintended way. A great example is software piracy that helped to spread and widely adopt Microsoft Windows and few other Microsoft products. If Apple hardware was more readily available, and Apple software easier to steal, they could have become “the Microsoft” today. Granted, it has cost Microsoft a lot of money, but it have gave Windows a huge market share. In fact, no matter how much music industry complaints about piracy, teenagers swapping MP3 files is one of the biggest reasons for popularity of the top records. Of course, music and video industry has much tougher problem than Microsoft did: one have to be that good for the viral marketing (or piracy) to work, otherwise they just expose that you are trying to sell junk.
In a simplified form, to start a viral marketing campaign you have to provide something (link, eBook, story, literally anything you choose) that has three qualities:
1. People want it.
2. People want to pass it to other people.
3. It’s inseparable from your marketing message.
That’s it. Looks simple, is it? Alas, it is not, but if you do it right, the rewards are huge. Windows. Hotmail. iPod. Britney Spears.
Actually, here we are. This is exactly what the words “anchor”, “carrier” and “payload” mean.
1. An anchor – the reason why people want that thing that you give away. This is the value they get from having it. It may be new knowledge, monetary gain, self-esteem, or anything else, as long as they really want it.
2. A carrier – the reason why people want to give it to others. That’s the value they get from passing it to others. It could be status, monetary gain, respect of others, you name it.
3. A payload – your marketing message. A reason why you want all the trouble of creating it in the first place. That’s what you gain from sending that object out.
Forget about any one of them, and your viral campaign will stumble and die. Do all three right, and reap the results for years and years to come. Your choice.
Comments