Competition has gone global and the market and industry dynamics have necessitated the need for companies to make concerted efforts streamlined towards ensuring that their marketing strategies are not only effective but also competitive prices. This has resulted in the adoption of various marketing strategies such as viral marketing. Viral marketing, just like other marketing concepts, is aimed at achieving customer loyalty and a competitive edge. Just as its name suggests, viral marketing is based on the multiplicity effect. According to Haag, Cummings, and McCubbrey (2008), “Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence”. One company that has extensively made use viral this strategy is Google Inc. through the provision of free email services, free chat services, and a load of other factors.
I believe my institution can reap loads of benefits if it adopted viral marketing. This is based on the analysis that whereas there is increased traffic of students and nonstudents accessing the site, there is a lack of advertisement. My school would go about adopting this strategy if it embraced effective strategies of viral marketing. First, it would benefit my giving away valuable products or services. This can be in the form of registration fee waivers for the first group of prospective students to register online. The spiraling effect of such a service give-away will attract several students and will be spread by those who have the information.
The principles of viral marketing hinge on the ability to exploit common motivators and behaviors among a group of people. My school is composed of students who are madly in love with sports. To attract their attention to the site, the site administrator can simply have a link to a popular sports site on the school site. This would take care of the student’s and visitors’ communication networks and as such attract a considerable number of aspiring students to join the huge number of career opportunities offered by my school. According to Wilson (2005), “the resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages; design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner”.
In addition to the above, my school can effectively take advantage of others’ resources in its adoption of viral marketing. This involves the creation of affiliate programs with other sites. This element of viral marketing is demonstrated by Wilson (2005) in stating that “a news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers and that can be someone else’s newsprint or webpage relaying your marketing message.”
The other available e-commerce marketing is e-mail marketing. My school could adopt email marketing through the application of the best principles. This is because of the cut-throat competition in email marketing that is demonstrated by billions of spam messages every year. While there are many challenges in the adoption of this strategy, my school can ensure that it uses a high-impact subject line, place the web address of the school early in the email, make the email detailed enough to deliver the message, and write with enthusiasm. The aim of adopting different marketing concepts is to ensure as much market penetration and customer attraction as possible.
References
- Haag, S., Cummings, M. and McCubbrey, D. (2008). Management information systems for the information age. Pittsburg: McGraw-Hill Irwin
- Wilson, R. F. (2005). The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing. Web.