Viral Marketing
Viral marketing encourages word-of-mouth promotion by capitalizing on social networks and
customers’ desire to contribute to and share message content with their peers. A viral marketing campaign
is more likely to succeed when the message content is able to highly resonate with the target audience and
appeal to this group’s motivations for sharing information. Consumers who are more individualistic (in
that they want to differentiate themselves from others) and/or more altruistic tend to be those who are also
most likely to forward online content (Ho & Dempsey, 2008). In general, there are three types of
strategies that marketers can use to seed a viral campaign: seeding emails, online advertising, or offline
advertising. Once a campaign has been initiated, it is crucial that marketers effectively manage every
stage by analyzing the source of the viral content invitation; if and when a customer accesses the viral
campaign page; and the number of referrals a customer makes to his or her friends