Viral marketing is another word for word of mouth advertising, or the general buzz that occurs about the release of a new product or service. Generally, viral marketing can be provoked, if two requirements are met. You first need a product that is contagious, and you also need somebody at your company who can generate buzz and get the viral marketing campaign going and then can keep it going over a sustained period of time. Marketing this way allows your product to spread, like a virus, through the marketplace.

Viral marketing is no different from other marketing programs in that it requires a strong plan and an even stronger champion. You can do a plan for an individual marketing campaign; you should also include the virus in your overall strategic marketing plan. How you ultimately choose to launch the campaign is entirely up to you but be sure to include in your plans ways that your customers will share the product and talk about it with others; because that is at the heart of the marketing virus.

To capture and retain the attention of the customer try unusual and different ways to promote and sell your product. For example, a web company would be expected to market itself on the Internet and an offline marketing campaign would catch the people's attention, as it would be a different style of selling. To ensure that it will spread through word of mouth, make a campaign simple and catchy.

There are various ways of doing this. Feature films are marketed by initially spending a large amount on publicity before and at the time of release, after which the publicists fall back on word of mouth publicity to take over once people start talking to others about the film. Hotmail hit on a very good idea when it decided to use a tagline on their e-mail sites, advertising their free e-mail service.

This ensures that the word about the product spread around the marketplace by word of mouth. Advertising of new feature films is a fine example of how viral marketing is used. Though it starts with an initial round of advertising in other forms, it is the contribution of viral marketing that makes the difference.

Scott F. Geld is the supervising manager of Marketing Blaster, Inc, a pay-per-click traffic source that continually beats the other major search engines in conversion ratio and ROI.