The buzz word in the marketing world is viral marketing. What is it and how can you use it? Viral marketing uses interesting and often interactive tools that appeals to the reader and inspires them to share with friends, family and colleagues voluntarily.

A recent example of this appeared in our inboxes last year from McCain - an interactive flash application allowing the viewer to create their own personal potato parade! A fun and hugely successful campaign which was visited by over 100,000 people in its first week! Visit the site.

YouTube hosts a wealth of videos promoting products such as Budweiser Beer, where humorous video clips are created to raise brand awareness and then made available to viewers via email and online. The effect is powerful, self-sustaining and exponential.

These are multinational brands using this mechanism to promote their brands but viral marketing is available to local, regional and national brands as well.

Whilst often used to raise brand awareness, viral marketing can also be used to build a contact database. In December, Simplicity created a Christmas viral marketing campaign in the form of an online flash game. Players were invited to register their details after playing the game in order to submit their score. Of the registered players, 29% were brand new contacts to Simplicity meaning that they were externally introduced to the game and more importantly, the Simplicity brand - THIS is viral marketing.

If you could increase your contacts substantially, how valuable would that be to your company? There are a number of cost effective routes to viral marketing – just contact Simplicity to find out how viral marketing can work for you.