Viral Marketing Examples

Sometimes actually seeing viral marketing examples helps explain this new marketing technique. Viral marketing is a marketing method by which content is passed by word of mouth from one person to the other. The content may support the company’s brand, or simply generate the coveted buzz or excitement among customers. Viral marketing is spread much in the same way viruses and germs are, passed along from user to user. The Internet makes this method of engaging customers very easy, but it also makes competition fierce. Successful viral marketing examples will give you insights into what works and what doesn’t work in the new world of viral marketing.

What Works in Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is virtually free advertising for any company. After the initial cost in time and effort invested in the campaign itself, the actual sharing of the message is free for the company who originated the message. But getting customers to engage in the content and share it among friends, family and coworkers can be tough.

Tips for Excellent Viral Marketing

Marketing Sherpa, the website where professional marketing managers go for the latest information on marketing tactics, provides links to eight how-to articles on viral marketing. The common elements among these articles point to the following steps marketers should take in order to produce a great viral marketing campaign.

The steps are:

• Evoke emotion: Among viral marketing examples, the most popular campaigns are those that evoke emotion, especially laughter. Whether you make someone chuckle, smirk or choke back sobs, evoking emotion is a key ingredient in successful viral marketing campaigns.
• Shock and awe or surprise and delight: Another way to say shock and awe is to do the unexpected! Most commercials on television today are ho-hum. Moms extol the virtues of their paper towels, adorable kids grin gap-toothed smiles while eating cereal, and serious men in gray suits explain life insurance. Great viral marketing examples provide viewers with a jolt that grabs attention.
• Avoid making a commercial: If you want to make a television commercial, make a television commercial and buy advertising space, or make your own video and post it to YouTube. But don’t make an advertisement and promote it as a viral campaign. It isn’t. Those who are likely to pass along viral campaigns will ignore blatant ads. You’ve got to tell a story and provide something fresh and original to have it pass from commercial to viral.

Great Viral Marketing Examples

Seeing is believing, and seeing can also mean understanding. Visiting the websites and clips of popular viral marketing examples can help you understand and incorporate the basics into your next campaign.

Will It Blend?

Most people know about one of the great viral marketing campaigns of all time, the WillItBlend campaign. Those behind the campaign are demonstrating how the Blendtec blends anything, and they mean anything. From avocados to an iPod, they’ve tortured the poor blender with everything but the kitchen sink (and the kitchen sink is probably next week’s video).

Here’s why the WillItBlend campaign works so well:

• It’s funny, evoking laughter from almost everyone who sees the videos.
• It’s truthful to the brand and supports the company’s brand promise: this blender blends anything. Yet it never strays into television commercial territory.
• It shocks by the sheer absurdity of it. No one in their right mind would place expensive electronic devices in a blender. However, by demonstrating the strength of the blender on plastic, viewers intuitively understand that it’s strong enough to chop ice cubes for their daiquiris.

Quizzes and Zombies

Viral campaigns aren’t limited to video, although video makes for some of the most powerful examples. Quizzes can be part of a viral marketing campaign too.

In Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, the viral quiz helps readers determine whether or not they could survive a catastrophe – specifically a zombie apocalypse. Now not many will go through this, but in the off chance that zombies roam the earth, readers can get a score. This particular quiz is very popular among teens and spread like wildfire.

Here’s why the Zombie Apocalypse quiz works as viral marketing:

• It’s scary, making people think, “What if a catastrophe did happen? Would I be prepared?”
• It’s unexpected. Many people write about the 2012 Mayan prophesies or the catastrophe of global warming, but not many truly believe zombies are real.

List Mania

Readers love lists. They’re easy to scan through on the web and easy to share. Creating a list that becomes a viral marketing campaign may be as easy as brainstorming a “top ten” category related to your product. One great example of a website that uses lists as a viral campaign is Life Hacker. The pages have received well over a thousand Diggs, which means that over a thousand people have voluntarily shared it – and the advertising content – with their Internet world.

Lists may not follow all the tips for great viral marketing campaigns exactly, but they are perhaps the easiest for most marketers to incorporate into the marketing plan, and can be just as effective as video or other media. The trick to transforming lists into viral campaigns is to ensure they contain evergreen content and appeal to a broad a swathe of the population. Since a huge number of Americans are sleep-deprived, promising sweet dreams is a sure way to grab attention.

Resources for Viral Marketing Examples

More viral marketing examples may be found on the following resources:

• The Techipedia site’s examples of viral content underscore many of the tips to create great viral marketing campaigns. There are many examples and additional types of viral content listed on the site.
• Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist, lists examples in his blog.
• Tech Crunch provides examples including Facebook’s own viral marketing efforts.

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