Viral Marketing – Only For The Braveheart?
Google’s Insights For Search reveals opposing trends. While demand for viral videos continues to grow, less marketers are querying Google for “viral marketing”.
Source: Google Insights
Clearly the term “viral videos” (marked in red) is largely searched by average users and its search volume is influenced by periodical viral hits. But, the term “viral marketing” (marked in blue) is most likely searched by marketers and its search volume, as shown above, is in decline since the beginning of the economic crisis in mid 2008.
So what can we conclude from this data?
First, it is apparent that online viral marketing, being greatly misunderstood and still relatively new, is correlated with the economic trend. When businesses tighten their budgets and limit their advertising spending they stick to “proven” marketing methods and avoid “experimental” marketing.
The term “online marketing” has gained search volume in the same time period. That supports my assumption.
Second, we are now in a crossroad. There are two options how things will turn out from this point.
One option is that marketers will eventually notice the growing demand for viral content and start to supply it to the market.
The other option is that the decreasing cost effectiveness of traditional online advertising channels will push marketers to look into more effective methods and so they’ll end up “experimenting” with viral marketing again.
In any case, I’m positive that very soon, the interest in viral marketing will rise again. Why am I so sure that this will happen? Well, additional data that Google Insights For Search supplies is rising searches. Let’s take a look at rising searches related to viral marketing:
Source: Google Insights
This data shows the trend since 2004. However, “Breakout” means that the increase in search volume for the above terms exceeds 5,000%. Additionally, long term trends are normally stronger than short term trends. I believe that this case is the same.
Lastly, the more we see, hear and learn about viral marketing successes such as the recent Old Spice campaign, and the clearer the marketing value of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter becomes to the average marketer, the less “experimental” viral marketing will be perceived and will become the mainstream marketing method if not for all the reasons above, for only a simple one:
If computers represent the brains of the Internet, viral content is the heart!
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Hi Ran,
Thanks for the posting and welcome to ViralBlog.com!
Thanks,
Nice to join.
Hi Ran – welcome to the ViralBlog posting team!
Those are some interesting stats, but I think there may be another reason.
Two years ago viral marketing was hotter than the sun, but than the new kid on the block showed up – ‘social media’.
I believe many people use the terms interchangeably and the focus currently has very much shifted to social media.
Marketers still want their content distributed through the viral web and they are still hoping to reach viral spread, but instead of viral marketing people now talk about ‘influencer outreach’, ‘digital PR’ and ‘social media marketing’.
That’s one of the reasons why we have created a visual database, helping people make sense of some of the intricacies of social media. You can find them here: http://viraltracker.com/visuals/
Thanks Daan.
I entered the terms you mentioned in your comment to Google insights and found out as expected that there is a sharp growth in search volume for “social media marketing” and “digital PR” so what you say makes sense. Good point!