What is viral marketing? What are the characteristics?

It takes advantage of the participation enthusiasm of target consumers, but the promotion cost of channel use still exists, only the target consumers are stimulated by the information of the merchants and voluntarily participate in the subsequent communication process, and the advertising cost that should have been borne by the merchants is passed on to the target consumers, so for the merchants, viral marketing is cost-free. Target consumers can't profit from "working for the enterprise". Why do they volunteer to provide communication channels? The reason is that, first of all, the information transmitted by the communicator to the target group is not naked advertising information, but processed and attractive product and brand information, and it is this beautiful coat that breaks through the "firewall" of consumers' alert psychology and urges them to complete the transformation from pure audience to active communicator.

2. Propagation speed.

The marketing mode of mass media advertising is "one-to-many" radial communication, and it is actually impossible to determine whether the advertising information really reaches the target audience. Viral marketing is a spontaneous and extensive information promotion. It is not delivered to everyone in society in a balanced, synchronous and indiscriminate way, but through channels similar to interpersonal communication and group communication, consumers will deliver product and brand information to those individuals who have some connection with them. For example, when the target audience reads an interesting flash, his first reaction may be to forward it to friends and colleagues, and countless "forwarding armies" involved in it constitute the main force of geometric multiple communication.

3. Efficient reception.

There are some insurmountable defects in advertisements in mass media, such as strong information interference, complex acceptance environment and serious defensive resistance of the audience. Take TV advertisements as an example. At the same time, various advertisements appear on TV at the same time, and many similar products "crash", which greatly reduces the audience's acceptance efficiency. For those lovely "viruses", the audience gets them from familiar people or actively looks for them, so they will naturally have a positive attitude in the process of accepting them; Receiving channels are also relatively private, such as text messages, emails, closed forums, etc. There are also several people reading at the same time, which in turn expands the communication effect. The above advantages enable viral marketing to overcome the noise influence in information dissemination as much as possible and enhance the communication effect.

4, the update speed is fast.

Network products have their own unique life cycle, and generally come and go quickly. The spreading process of viral marketing is usually an S-shaped curve, that is, it starts slowly, accelerates when it reaches half of the audience, and slows down when it approaches the maximum saturation point. In view of the attenuation of viral marketing communication power, we must transform communication power into purchasing power before the audience is immune to information in order to achieve the best sales effect.