April 29, 2007

According to Marketing Sherpa's 2007 Viral Marketing Survey, Internet marketers with viral campaign experience love microsites a lot. They are also very fond of games and video clips and similar methods of promoting a product or service.

Overall, experienced viral marketers now strongly recognize that creating a separate presence for viral marketing campaigns can have a big impact on their overall ROI.

Creating cool microsites topped all other tactics, with 37 percent of experienced marketers saying they produced great results. Overall, about 32 percent thought that online games brought significant results.

Generally speaking, video clips received good reviews from marketers, with about 30 percent saying they yielded great results, and just 13 percent admitting their results were much below par.

Some 43 percent of experienced marketers said they spend between $5,000 and $10,000 on video clips in their viral marketing campaigns, while 49 percent of less-experienced marketers said they get the job done with $2,500 to $5,000 in spending.

Approximately 66 percent of consumer marketers in the study said they planned to use video in a campaign during the coming year. However, what are the chances of a video actually going viral?

According to an Online Publishers Association (OPA) survey, not that high. When people view online videos that are compelling, amusing or just plain weird, they tell other people.

On average, only about 9 percent of respondents to the OPA survey did so frequently, but an additional 29 percent occasionally let others know about online videos.

According to eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman, there are two ways of looking at the OPA study's results. "Since fewer than about 10 percent of users frequently tell others about online video, it could be argued that the whole concept of viral online video marketing is somewhat overblown," says Hallerman.

He added "on average, only about one in 10 people in any industry are the influencers who give word-of-mouth marketing its real power."

"Reliance on viral video, rather than making it just one element for getting the message out, will succeed only in rare cases," he said.

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Source: eMarketer