Can Viral Videos Drive Traffic?

During the last few years, viral marketing has become very popular on the internet. Viral marketing can be considered as a marketing technique based on social networks that will help you to increase your brand, blog or website awareness. In some cases it can also have a more commercial side to it, in order to achieve other commercial objectives such as a product or service sale. It is very similar to word of mouth but uses various supports to enhance the spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm. One way to do viral marketing is to use videos and put them online, on various websites such as youtube or dailymotion. Today we will be having a look at whether viral videos can be used or not in order to drive traffic to your blog or website.

To make a viral video, you either need a good camera and do it yourself or use a web agency. Companies mostly use web agencies where as bloggers tend to create viral videos themselves. The goal for companies is to drive traffic where as for bloggers it is mainly for fun and notoriety. But in both cases, creating viral video has a cost as it requires equipment and time.

Marketingexperiments.com created 28 videos which were published on Youtube and Google Video in order to see the effect it had on traffic and whether this method was profitable. or not Each video  was amateurish and had a length between 15 seconds to 8 minutes and included a link to their main website. The total cost for the equipment was $9,600. The goal of their expirement was not to produce videos like an advertising agency would, but to produce more amateur videos as bloggers would do in order to analyse their viral impact on traffic. As a consequence, the videos were not promotional but more humorous oriented. They then tracked during 2 months the amount of times each video was viewed, the click-through rate and subscription rate.

So what were the results? Well they were rather good, as in 2 months the 28 videos had 324,190 views. The amount of clicks to their site from these video was 4,162 which represents a 1.28% click rate! The conversion rate to newsletter subscribtion was 1.49%! What is really interesting in their analysis is that they compared this to PPC Traffic. They found out that the cost for advertising with PPC for the first two months would have been of $1,248.60 which is equal to $20.14 per subscriber where as it would have been free if published on video social media platforms such as Youtube and Google Video.

To sum up, you can clearly see that by creating a viral video you can drive traffic easily and save money compared to Video PPC. Nevertheless creating a viral video is not that easy. To help you, I recommend you to read an article on TechCrunch about the secret strategies behind many viral videos.

Technorati Tags: viral video, viral marketing, traffic, PPC, marketing experiments

Does advertising influence binge-drinking?

Adverts promoting alcohol have no direct impact on the consumption in terms of quantity. Indeed, a study from the ”International Centre for Alcohol policies”, showed that an increase in beer advertising has no real impact on beer consumption. One of the reasons for this is that alcohol advertising is heavily regulated.

Even though alcohol advertising has very little influence on consumption in terms of quantity, it has a large influence on the purchase behaviour of the young consumer regarding the types of alcohol bought. Young consumers are aware of brands and products available; they react positively to new innovative products, and are willing to test new products. In most cases they have an emotional reaction to an ad and are therefore easily influenced by it as these advertisements “talk their language or portray images or events that are relevant to their lives and interests” (Advertising Standards Authority, Dec 2005).

Young consumers in general are known to be open to testing new products and having unconscious attitudes, such as binge-drinking. In the last 10 years, brands, in order to gain market shares, have launched new types of drinks that target the demands of young people. They have done large advertising campaigns so that young consumers are aware of these new types of drinks. This is why there has been a change in the purchase and consumption behaviour of young people regarding the types of alcohol drunk and bought. A report from the Department of Health has showed that there has been a change in the behaviour of young people that are now consuming more and more strong or sweet alcohols such as Alcopops or strong spirits.

Another impact of alcohol advertising on young people’s lifestyles is the location where they will be drinking. A change of location from pubs to night clubs and parties has occurred especially with alcopop drinks. The Smirnoff ad on the left is a perfect example of an ad promoting alcohol but also influencing where it will be consumed. The ad pushes people to party and have fun (night clubs, parties …).

All in all, advertising that promotes alcohol has a direct influence on the purchase behaviour of young people regarding the type of drink consumed and on their lifestyles with the location where alcohol is drunk.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, alcohol, alcohol consumption, binge-drinking, smirnoff