Viral Digital Marketing

With the evolution of technology, the access to the internet has become more convenient and widely available to the world. There are currently 4.2 billion Internet users in the world today. With that huge number, company’s are able to reach out to a wider range of audience without spending much cause of digital marketing.

Marketing in company’s have changed over the years. Offline marketing used to be the only way where companies could advertise and show their presence. Billboards, posters, roadshows and giving out flyers were some of the ways companies used to advertised. However, the creation of the internet as well as Facebook has seen huge success from companies advertising on these various platforms.

Many companies caught on the trend of digital marketing and started to advertise on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google ads and ranking top on Google’s search engine. These made it tougher for companies to stand out from all the other companies with their advertisements all over the internet.

Seth Gordin in his book “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable” defines remarkable marketing as the art of building things worth noticing right into the product or service. To catch the eye of audiences looking through tons of advertisements and videos on the internet, companies would need to create an advertisements that captures the users attention in the first few seconds or create a viral video (Viral marketing). To stand out of the crowd.

One such company that did this successfully was Uniqlo. Many would see Uniqlo as a fashion brand as it sells clothes and fashion accessories. However, Uniqlo sees themselves as a technology company instead and the best way to market this was through digital marketing.

With big brands such as Topman, Forever 21, H&M and Zara advertising online as well, they needed a great digital marketing plan to stand out from these brands.

Uniqlo decided to create a global image campaign and placed it over 100 physical stores as well as online. The campaigns used fast moving images on the advertisements that shows unique product codes to be capture by taking a photo. Customers would then upload these codes online to redeem a free HEATTECH sample. Participants were then encouraged to their photos on social media and refer it to their friends to try.

The results of Uniqlo’s campaign was a huge success. It gathered over 1.3 million views on their online video reached over 4 million people and got 35,000 new customers.

Uniqlo has used digital marketing to gain a creative edge over the other clothing brands. It used digital marketing in a way where it interacts with the customers and let them tell and create the brand story of Uniqlo. However, one thing to take caution of in digital marketing is that at times, it may go out of control like a wild fire and it would be hard to stop. Therefore, it is important for companies to control the conversation of their digital marketing campaign to prevent bad branding or backfire from customers.

Digital marketing and viral marketing is a way to go with the rise on technology and the internet. It is a cheaper alternatives as well as reaching out to larger audience. However, as more companies are discovering viral marketing and digital marketing, it would be harder to stand out from all the other brands that are advertising as well. Therefore, it is important to keep ideas fresh and creative whenever digital marketing is involved.

I hope everybody has learned something on digital marketing through this short post. Do feel free to leave a comment on your thoughts on digital marketing! I would be glad to read every comment and reply to it. Till the next post!