When you buy something or use a service of a certain establishment, even sometimes you are satisfied with what you got, then don’t you recommend that to a friend? And when you give your recommendation, doesn’t your friend buy or avail of it as well?

More often we express our satisfaction with some item or service by telling our friends and relatives about our experience. Some of them will actually try the same product or service that we recommended. Essentially, we have just successfully advertised the product through word-of-mouth without the establishment having to spend a penny on it.

This is what we call viral marketing. Viral marketing is an advertising strategy that let people to pass on their marketing message to their friends and relatives. It is called as such because of its similarity to an epidemic that easily spreads out, with an exponential growth, once an individual gets “infected.”

How viral marketing started?
The concept of viral marketing, which is passing along a message, has been around for a long time now, even for centuries. Specific term as "viral marketing" was given by Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, in 1997 to describe Hotmail’s marketing practice then.
Hotmail’s practice was to append an advertisement of itself on each message that is sent using their service. When a recipient gets interested and clicks on the ad, it will lead to Hotmail’s website for him to signup. This will go on and on, and the growth is similar to an exponential curve.

Types of Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing Strategies can be applied in various ways:
1.Pass-along :
This is the most common type of viral marketing. Web sites that ask their users to tell-a-friend about their products and services is an example of pass-along messaging. However, there is a risk of the message being labeled as “spam” by email providers. Thus, it is important that the “from” and “subject” lines do not contain any word that may be tagged as spam.
2.Incentivised viral
This is a marketing technique used by companies in which users are offered rewards when they refer somebody to the company. This becomes more effective when the referred person needs to take action for the reward to be given.
3.Undercover
This is considered to be one of the difficult viral to track, undercover marketing sends a viral message that is disguised as just an unusual page or piece of news without obvious link citations.
4.Buzz marketing or Edgy Gossip :
This type is most common in the entertainment world. This is like a word-of-mouth advertising for the movie.

Methods of Transmission
Spreading the viral message can be done in different ways.
1.Email
This is the most common type, when people forwards messages such as inspirational messages, jokes, funny clips and pictures that advertises a certain product or service.
2.Instant Messaging
People who receive links from friends through instant messaging servers, like Yahoo or MSN, are more likely to check it out because of the notion of urgency of the sender.
3.Web sites
Most of the articles now published online have a link that says “Send to a friend.” This is one way to make the article reach a good number of people by just posting it in one site.
4.Word of mouth
Indeed, this is the most traditional way of message passing to another person; and considered as the most reliable method too.

Though there are several ways on how to do this kind of advertising, there are also barriers to it. One was already mentioned, which is the risk of the message being labeled as “spam.” Since a lot of companies now are using this method and promoting their products through email, email providers proactively created some sort of filter in their system to separate potential spam emails from the more trusted ones.

But despite of these constraints, businesses are already getting into this style of marketing. As per such marketing strategy helps in gradually increasing revenues by reaching a huge number of the target market without having to spend a big chunk of money for advertisements. Viral marketing will definitely go a long way, especially in the World Wide Web.