Best On Importance Of Viral Marketing, Business Marketing
A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.
Below are few aspects that depict why viral marketing is essential.
1. Every time someone shares with a friend or makes a payment, they naturally invite more and more people into the network. This isn’t just cheap—it’s fast, too. If every new user leads to more than one additional user, you can achieve a chain reaction of exponential growth. The ideal viral loop should be as quick and frictionless as possible.
2. Funny YouTube videos or internet memes get millions of views very quickly because they have short cycle times: people see the kitten, feel warm inside, and forward it to their friends in a matter of seconds.
3. At PayPal, the initial user base was 24 people, all of whom worked at PayPal. Acquiring customers through banner advertising proved too expensive. However, by directly paying people to sign up and then paying them more to refer friends, they achieved extraordinary growth.
4. This strategy cost us $20 per customer, but it also led to 7% daily growth, which meant that their user base nearly doubled every ten days. After four or five months, they had hundreds of thousands of users and a viable opportunity to ‘build a great company by servicing money transfers for small fees that ended up greatly exceeding the customer acquisition cost.
5. Whoever is first to dominate the most crucial segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market. They didn’t want to acquire more users at random; they tried to get the most valuable users first.
6. The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Their product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.
They needed a smaller niche market segment with a higher velocity of money—a feature they found in eBay “PowerSellers,” the professional vendors who sold goods online through eBay’s auction marketplace. There were 20,000 of them. Most had multiple auctions ending each day, and they bought almost as much as they sold, which meant a constant stream of payments.
6. eBay’s solution to the payment problem was terrible; these merchants were extremely enthusiastic early adopters. Once PayPal dominated this segment and became the payments platform for eBay, there was no catching up—on eBay or anywhere else.
7. The Power Law of Distribution —One of these methods is likely to be far more potent than every other for any given business: distribution follows a power law of its own. This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work.
8. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than the wrong product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
Remain focussed and understand what will work with each type of customer. Contact HyperEffects to chart out a tailor-made business marketing strategy for your company and see your business show up on television ads, press releases, and major channel partners. A poorly designed website can repulse people from your business and can cause you to lose customers before you even have them. We also work on creating, enhancing, and making the website of your company more user-friendly. For many target customers, social media is becoming an ever more popular focus for advertising campaigns as it can be a very inexpensive way to reach many different users. Use social media to get more sales for your business.