The Viral Marketing Mindset

(You can find the introduction to this article, in my
previous post From Mass Marketing to Viral Marketing)

Coming from more than 60 years of Mass Marketing, the mindset of a marketer has to make a big change from…

• Designing ONE marketing message that, through mass media, will reach directly as many target customers as possible (and lot’s of non targets as well…), trying to convince them of buying or doing something. Most of the times, these messages were intrusive and not relevant; they got in the middle of a content you were interested and you were somehow “forced” to see it.

…to something completely different that is…

• Design one marketing message addressed directly to few people. Create an incentive system for the message to be passed on to other people (it can be that the message it’s just very funny, very interesting content, it can be money, etc). Design a message that can mutate and be changed by the users in the process of recommendation. And finally the most difficult part of all: The message will have to be extremely relevant for its audience, otherwise people won’t see it and won’t recommend it.

The change in the mindset of a marketeer is the first step required to make the leap from mass marketing to viral marketing, but it's not the only thing needed. If we get into a campaign level, there are some tactical issues that need to be taken into account. All this analysis and the realization that the way marketing is done has changed for good, led me to the following questions:

• What elements are needed to create a successful Viral Marketing campaign?
• What do we need to take into account when trying to make Viral Marketing Hit?

I’ll discuss in part three of this series of posts dedicated to Viral Marketing: Viral Marketing Key Success Factors.

Copyright by MBA Internet Marketing Manager