Archive for November, 2009

When referring to a viral marketing audience, we should define further what is meant by “segmentation.” The concept of audience segmentation, especially in social marketing such as the WIC campaign I mentioned earlier or the ongoing “Click it or Ticket” seat-belt campaigns, is that not all consumers are alike.

Each group of consumers can be grouped into various “segments” which allow you to design campaigns to focus your scarce resources where they are most likely to do accomplish the most good.

For instance, in the seat-belt campaign it became obvious that the primary target audience, Hispanic families who had strong feelings about God causing death and injury, were unlikely to be convinced to belt their children due to risk or education. They were more likely to accede to cost-driven aspects such as being forced to do so or pay a fine that they could ill afford.

This drove the campaign to take the current model where the advertisements are more a warning of the potential actions and penalties you will incur rather then an educational treatment showing the damage that you could avoid by using the existing seat belts available to you!

The types of information that were used to identify which specific groups made up the real target audience for this particular social marketing campaign included information about the:

• Incidence or severity of the problem
• Prevalence of risk factors
• Size of the group affected
• Relative defenselessness (if applicable)

Often in social marketing such as this the audience segments are described by a wide variety of variables such as:

• Those at risk for the health problem
• Attitudes of those segments
• Perceptions
• Demographics
• Preferred information channels

Much of this type of information can be gathered directly in the form of polls and questionnaires, but often the real research and leg work necessary to correctly target your audience has to take place through trial and error. The process of segmenting your audience starts by first making a list of all the primary audience segments that you wish to target, then defining each of those segments in terms of:

• Demographics (e.g., age and race/ethnicity)
• Behavioral determinants that distinguished “doers” from “non-doers” For example, if you are trying to promote forwarding e-mails for a motorcycle campaign, identify bike riders who have actively participated in the past rather then just all bike riders in your database.<\li>

For each of the potential segments listed, pull the following information from your research findings:

• Goals/drivers for the users in the segment
• What has previously and historically worked to influence this segment
• Which contact and information channels appeal to the users, e-mail, website links, newsletters, etc.
• How receptive they are to direct contact

Another aspect that you should bear in mind when working with target segments is the secondary or “influencing” audience segments. For example, if you are targeting bikers, then motorcycle dealerships are a secondary or “influencing” segment which has some control and/or input to your target audience. As such, that “influencing” segment may also be worth targeting as directly or in a related campaign.

In the WIC-Breastfeeding social marketing campaign we mentioned in the Viral Marketing course, a secondary audience segment that was found to be influential to woman’s decision to breastfeed or not was identified and included and resulted in a significant increase in response once involved. Making the difficult decision to prioritize segments and focusing your efforts early on is vital to a successful campaign, especially when limited resources are available!

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Some Strategies

Some strategies are obviously going to work better than others. The Hotmail campaign in which “free” services are utilized with no apparent cost to the end-user, are no-brainers. Approaches where some initial up-front costs are charged to credit cards or where “future” charges will be incurred are much less likely to generate active involvement. Few promotions will work as well as Hotmail’s strategy because most products and services don’t generate revenue via their day to day use. Hotmail users spread the word and generated new business simply by using the service itself. You can increase your campaign’s likelihood success and its ability to generate new business traffic by including one or more of the following proven “viral” elements:

Let’s examine each of these success elements briefly.

Gives away valuable products or services

There is no question that “Free” is one of the most powerful words in marketing. It’s not surprising, then, that most viral marketing campaigns and programs include some method of giving away products or services of varying values to attract attention and draw customers. From free e-mail services or free information to free “cool” giveaway items such as buttons, posters and pens to trial software programs that perform powerful functions hinting at the full-fledged capabilities available in the “pro” versions, the list of potential products and services to give away for free is practically endless. Part of the reasoning behind this is the Second Law of Web Marketing known as Wilson’s “Law of Giving and Selling” which in part stipulates that while words like Cheap or inexpensive may generate interest they won’t do so as fast as simply saying “FREE!”

One of the keys to the success of modern viral marketers is that they practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit eventually and hopefully for a long time afterwards. Investing up front by providing goods for “free” to the end-user attracts attention that can then be redirected to other desirable things you are selling that will and eventually earn money.

Provides for effortless transfer to others

With real-life viruses, you find that public health nurses offer sage advice during flu seasons and high risk locations: “simply stay away from anyone who coughs, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth and you are much less likely to catch a virus or get ill.” This is because a virus only spreads when it’s allowed to transmit from one person to another. In the real world, the medium that carries the virus is normally mucus or other bodily fluids. Likewise, your marketing message must rely on existing mechanisms through which the message is just as easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, websites, graphics, software downloads, etc.

Viral marketing works so famously on the Internet, in part, because of the ease of near-instant and inexpensive communication and because people like to share things they see and hear. Digital formats make copying music and images simple. Most software interacts with other programs in some form or another, despite AOL’s noted exceptions! From a marketing standpoint, your goal is to simplify your message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation: shorter is best. As with the Hotmail campaign; saying “get it free”, then listing the location is about as simple as it gets.

Scales easily from small to very large

If you expect your message to spread like wildfire, then the transmission method needs to be rapidly scalable from small to very large. This was one of the few weaknesses of the Hotmail model. As a free e-mail service, it required its own mail servers for transmitting messages. When the strategy turned out to be wildly successful, more mail servers had to be added very quickly to support the rapid growth. Otherwise, the service would have bogged down and people would have deemed it unreliable.

Just as in real life, if the virus multiplies but kills the host before spreading, then nothing worthwhile is accomplished. Having an idea in advance of the potential for growth and for building any necessary scalability into your viral model is vital to a successful viral marketing campaign.

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