Quest for the holy viral

Cost-effectiveness, freshness, measurability and clear ROI – campaign qualities marketers are searching for during the turbulence of the credit crunch. While any channel can be touted for its flaws and merits, many are lauding viral marketing as the holy grail – campaigns so effective, they seed themselves – a cheap solution for trying times.

Consequently, the B2B arena has been infected with a rash of viral initiatives, with brands such as Google, Microsoft, Capgemini, IBM, UPS, Nortel, Siemens Medical Solutions and SAS (to name but a few) jumping on the viral bandwagon.

While successful campaigns can see as many as half a million hits and 100:1 ROI, those that crash and burn can have calamitous consequences for brands. With stakes set high in the current climate, B2B marketers must ask – could viral marketing be their credit crunch solution?

Catching the bug
This channel is “very useful in the current climate,” or so says Thierry Velut, brand manager of consulting, technology and outsourcing company Capgemini. And he would have good reason to say so – Capgemini’s recent ‘Together. Free your energies’ viral has generated 230,000 full video views, and directed over 15,000 unique visitors to the dedicated landing page, generating high levels of ROI.

“In the current climate [viral] has lots of advantages to advertisers because of cost-effectiveness, measurability and clear return on investment,” says Velut. Natalie Horne, planner at agency Mason Zimbler and its specialist viral off-shoot Rebel Virals, agrees. She says although the fact is exacerbated by the current climate, “marketing departments are always under pressure to deliver cost-effective, measurable communications.”

This begs the question: What is it about virals that makes them so effective?

“Viral offers brands the opportunity to leverage word of mouth and peer-to-peer sharing,” notes Horne. “You’re more likely to view something if it comes from someone you trust and who has similar interests to you,” elaborates Richard Perry, COO of integrated agency Gyro, and author of Viral Marketing in a Week, explaining that this step initiates the sales process. Successful campaigns will be fun, entertaining, rewarding and enriching – people will want to pass them on and evangelise them.

Measuring results
Marketers will get great security from the proven ROI that viral can offer, suggests Velut, advocating the demonstrable results the medium allows.

Measuring the success of a viral campaign is simple, he explains – video view rates, banner click-throughs, Adwords ranking and website traffic offer easy and instant trackability, and qualitative response from both employees and customers is easy to gather via email, blogs and forums. “There’s a whole lot of ways to measure success with specific reference to objectives,” agrees Horne.

“It is crucial you have a clear goal for what you want the campaign to achieve,” says Mel Carson, Adcentre community manager of Microsoft Advertising Europe, who oversaw Microsoft’s ‘Bring the love back’ campaign, which generated over 500,000 views. This way, he says, you’ll know where to measure your success.

Additionally, audiences will be drowning in a sea of dry, mundane communications as a result of skimpy marketing budgets, says Horne. “An injection of emotion is probably more important than ever if brands are to create impact, differentiation and build loyalty,” she says.

Seeing returns
Cost-effectiveness is one of the most attractive features of viral, as belts tighten. “It doesn’t rely on a hefty media budget – and that’s compelling [in the current climate],” notes Horne. But Perry points out you get what you pay for. “If a campaign is cheap and doesn’t work, it’s expensive; if a campaign is expensive and generates lots of sales, then it’s cheap,” he sums up.

Rebel Virals estimates the cost of a campaign upwards of £35,000, inclusive of idea generation, execution and seeding. James Trezona, director at Mason Zimbler and Rebel Virals, says the agency uses benchmarks that begin at 10:1, depending on the campaign objectives, but ROI can hit 100:1 and more through the initiation of a single sale as a result of the viral.

One way of calculating the value of this investment, he suggests, is to compare it with spending the same budget on other channels. “Compared to traditional media (offline) it hugely outperforms in terms of cost-per-response, awareness and influence on perceptions,” says Trezona.

No single solution
Viral is not however, a ‘fix-all’ warns Trezona. “It can’t make up for a poor sales and marketing channel or awful customer service. It’s just one of the tools,” he says, adding that the technique has strengths in raising awareness of new schemes, boosting recall and driving participation in incentive programmes, but isn’t good for closure deals.

Perry suggests viral can be used effectively to drive sales, generate databases, get brand messages into new markets and recruit new sales prospects. This is pivotal in figuring out whether viral is the right channel for your campaign, says Perry, suggesting marketers should figure out what they want to achieve rather than use viral for the sake of it.

Viral has to be part of an overarching campaign, experts agree. “It cannot exist by itself; it has to be built on top of classic marketing,” says Velut, while Carson adds that it’s imperative to back up your viral campaign with a sound search strategy. “Support the campaign with other branding and indications,” he says. “It all helps to create interest and buzz around the effort.”

Also important is that the brand essence remains constant, points out Trezona. The channel enables you to speak with a different tone, but should ultimately reflect core brand sentiments. Horne agrees. “It should be consistent with your core campaign message, but be approached from a more emotional angle,” he says.

Don’t miss the bullseye
The golden key to viral success is message relevance to target audience, stresses Velut. “If the message is not relevant, it will not be a success,” he says bluntly.

“A viral’s success depends on understanding the brand and pitching it correctly for the audience,” agrees Horne. Unlike B2C, B2B has a specific audience to reach with a viral and herein lies one of the bigger challenges of the medium – “You can’t miss the target,” she says.

Much of the success of a B2B viral campaign can hinge on this audience – chiefly business decision makers who are sometimes called the ‘C’ suite. This demographic spends a lot of time on computers and consuming the web, Velut points out, indicating the strength this lends to a digital campaign.

Taking a gamble
Things can go very wrong when a viral campaign does not carefully consider its target audience, experts agrees. “There have been horror stories,” admits Trezona, “but that’s true of all marketing.”

“What makes B2B virals daunting is that failure can be devastatingly public,” he says, speculating that this is as a result of the criteria for success being far higher than other channels. “High failure rates are a result of brands attempting to do virals without an understanding of either the medium or its audience,” Trezona adds.

The major risk with a viral is its reliance on the creative, according to Velut. “You can never be 100 per cent sure it will work,” he says. “If the video makes people laugh it will be a success, if not, it will be a failure. You have to take some risk.”

The campaigns walk a tightrope of not being funny enough or alienating an audience with a weak concept. Other factors that sink an initiative are when an audience takes offence, or reacts to overt marketing.

Mozilla committed such an error in January 2008 with an ill-advised viral campaign that featured inappropriate references to cancer. ‘Firefox users against boredom’ featured a variety of off-beat ‘statistics’ that compared Firefox and IE users, suggesting that Firefox users were less likely to have cancer than IE users. The campaign was torn to shreds by the blogging community and Mozilla quickly pulled it and released an apology.

If a campaign doesn’t get it right, the repercussions can be devastating. Damage to sales and to your brand play havoc with your companies’ sales force and channel operation, and – horror of horrors – can give your competitors an edge, says Perry. As with anything digital, he observes, once you’ve released a viral into the digital sphere, it’s out of your control.

Going forward
The future of viral lies in social media, according to Perry. Where email has historically been the seeding strategy, virals are currently shared through social networks.

“It’s in a second wave of maturity,” observes Trezona. Social networks are far more effective for spreading virals, says Perry, as marketers can log into predefined online communities of their audience, and rely on the power of endorsement. Marketers are able to harness the power of existing social networking or create a separate facility especially for their brand. The success of viral campaigns hinges on getting the creative out to as many people as possible in a short space of time, and social networking infrastructure allows you to do this efficiently, says Perry.

The flexibility, freshness and cost-effectiveness of viral marketing assures that it will be around for a while, and like the most resilient of bugs, adapt and mutate as marketing progresses. “It will never replace classic advertising though,” asserts Velut. “But it will be more and more important in the future,” he sums up.

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