We all know about viral marketing campaigns. They work because the people who experience them want to share that experience with others. When they do work, they are usually very cost effective because the public and then the media spread the idea for you for free. What people sometimes forget is that sometimes the idea itself isn’t cheap.
To me, the myth of viral marketing is that all you need is a good imagination, some free time, a cheap laptop or digital camera, and YouTube. For this to be true your good imagination really needs to be great, and your execution needs to be good enough to get your idea across clearly enough quickly enough. No mean feat if you ask me.
The truth is that it’s the experience itself that matters. The public will share when they experience something remarkable. Did they laugh out loud when they saw that video online? Were they amazed by the street performance they witnessed? Was that gig in the best venue they’d ever been in?
How Does This Apply To You And Your Business?
Well the first thing to say is that just because something looks cheap doesn’t mean it is cheap. Two contrasting viral hits are the John West Salmon video, which clearly was cheap, and the Microsoft Germany Megawoosh video, which clearly wasn’t. (You can see two “making of” videos for the Microsoft stunt here.)
The second thing to mention is that even if you have the best product in the world, your viral idea might be awful. Whether you’re making one yourself, or entrusting it to a marketing company, run the idea past a few people, and not just people who are going to agree with you! Otherwise you can end up spending more mopping up the mess when it goes wrong, as with the movie 2012′s viral campaign, or Sony’s aborted PSP campaign.
When You Get It Right…
All that said, when it goes right the payoff can be amazing. Take a look at this case study of a Heineken consumer activation from Italy. It will definitely resonate with any of the football fans in the audience.
(Thanks to Dan Leach and Hayes Thompson for the heads up on the video.)
For a start-up company like us, we don’t have the massive marketing budget or the know how ourselves to create brilliant experience like the Heineken one above. Come to the think of it, we probably don’t have the imagination or production talents to create a brilliant cheap video on our own either. Basically, viral is not for us, for now at least.
Just because a particular marketing method or channel is all the buzz right now, doesn’t mean it is right for your business. That goes for viral marketing, Twittering, blogging, vlogging and all the rest. Make sure that when you decide to spend you or your companies time and/or money on any of these activities that you understand what you have to invest to do it right, and understand that if you can’t afford to do it right, it’s probably not worth doing until you can.
Have you tried your hand at creating any viral marketing campaigns? What were the results like for you?
I suppose a good viral piece of marketing should mean that distribution is cheap. The problem is, that almost by definition, the creative is difficult and expensive. In effect viral shift the cost structure from distribution to creative.
What isn’t always obvious from a viral campaign, is that you see the one success but don’t get to see the 9 other virals that were launched and never went anywhere. Instead of spending 300,000 on one TV ad, big brands will instead spend 30k on 10 viral ideas in the hope that one gets traction. It doesn’t seem to cheap when you look at it that way.
Success rate must be a real problem for agencies trying to sell Viral as a marketing channel. I suspect you’re right James that there’s a massive failure rate for viral campaigns, but telling the client that they’re going to have to run (and fund) 10 campaigns to get one off the ground certainly doesn’t seem like an easy pitch.
Similarly for an in-house marketing person I’m sure after the first three or four attempts fail, they’re not going to be given more budget to try again…