Achieve Viral
Marketing Success
In order to achieve true viral marketing success, you need to
comply with as
many of the 9 success criterias of the viral marketing
business model as
possible ...
- Make an irresistible free offer
- Build a viral product - don't just try to
market a product virally
- Target alpha users
- Be creative and ahead of market trends
- Easy transfer is prerequisite
- Use existing social networks
- Use other's resources
- Allow for big scale traffic
- Measure and
optimise parameters of success
As no. 9 explains, one needs to measure the degree of success and
optimise the viral
advertising parameters if needed to get an exponential growth in web
site traffic.
For
example test and adjust
the following
parameters:
- The sources of traffic. Measure the incoming
web traffic to your
website and consider if you need to stress your efforts in certain
locations of promotion, i.e. social medias, other websites, press
releases etc. Do you use and deplete enough sources of traffic?
-
Number of Landing page views. Does
your landing page attract
sufficient traffic. If not why? Is the SEO sloppy, meaning that you
need to improve
search engine rankings more optimally. Is an eventual lack of
traffic due to a poor utilization of traffic sources?
-
% of users that register: Are the offered L2 viral marketing
products appealing enough to spur the user to register and
upgrade to the paid version?
-
% of users that send out
invites. Is the product interesting enough to recommend to others? Does
it support the senders pride, need to socialise and be accepted etc. Learn to target
alpha users, one
of the 9 Success Criterias of the Viral Marketing Business Model.
-
% of invites sent out, per user on
average. If this number is low, then does that indicate that not enough
alpha users are reached?
-
% of invites delivered successfully, i.e.
depending on the e-mail arriving at the mail box as opposed to the spam
filter.
-
% of invites read by users. If few read
it,
perhaps the text
including the headline and lenght should be changed. Shorter emails are
read more often.
-
% of virally added users, per
user
on
average. This overall parameter of viral marketing success could be
interpret as the sum of the "sexiness" of the product, the punch power
of the marketing message, the degree to which alpha users are reached
and the degree to which the viral feature is inherited in the product
from "birth".
The results of viral marketing or
word of mouth in terms of
marketing
buzz can be measured using "buzz monitoring".
True viral
marketing Success
Example of
Exponential Growth
Let's take a simple example to illustrate the exponential growth in
totals of users after 4 generations of passing on the
viral message.
Assumption
1: Each individual who engages automatically forwards the marketing
message to 10 persons, called invites on Facebook.
Assumption
2: The invites have a conversion rate of 20 % explained as the
percentage of invites who engage and pass on the marketing message.
User base: 10.000 users, who initiate the process
by each transfering the viral message to 10 invites from their social
network.
Amount of users after 4 generations of
viral marketing
| Generation |
Users
passing on message |
Total
amount of users |
| 1 |
10.000 |
30.000 |
| 2 |
20.000 |
70.000 |
| 3 |
40.000 |
150.000 |
| 4 |
80.000 |
310.000 |
The growth is truly
viral since the increase in users
after
each generation is bigger than the number of the
previous generation of users that spread the viral
message. This implies that to be viral the
conversion rate ought to be higher than 10 % if the average number of
invites per user is 10.
Viral marketing is perfect for promoting your
business, products and services when following the Viral Marketing
Business Model properly.
Viral marketing is perfect for promoting your
business, products and services when following the Viral Marketing
Business Model - 9 Success criterias
properly.
Once you make
it you make it big time
Dino Simone, August 2009
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