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Viral marketing involves making some quirky content and hoping people latch onto it, distributing it to friends. It’s so-named because of the way it spreads like a virus, with everyone exposed to it a potential disseminator.

I hate the concept, not because of the power of it or because of any questions of its efficacy, but because of the notion that you can engineer the viral quality.

Sure, it’s something to aim for, but to claim that you can carry out viral marketing is a big and inaccurate boast. The truth is, very few pieces of content become viral and as soon as you try and identify the qualities needed, you destroy them.

Viral content almost always comes about naturally and very rarely is it anything other than purely altruistic. Mostly it’s just pointless shit. Attach a point to pointless shit and you negate it.

A lot of traditional marketing companies fundamentally DO NOT GET how marketing works on the internet. They see that you have some web space and they treat it like it’s BBC primetime TV.

The important thing to remember about web marketing is that is primarily about getting people onto your site in the first place. Yes, you need to have everything set up so that they can then buy things, but writing sales copy on your blog is no good to anybody. Ask yourself this: why would somebody willingly seek out that article and read it?

If you have a blog, use it to write useful articles that people might be searching for. No-one is looking for sales copy online and even if they find it, it’ll turn them off.

Yesterday I spoke about how certain TV adverts are targeted at certain viewers and appear in certain programmes overly frequently. Generally, this is bad. Sometimes it works.

The example I would give is the Just For Men ad with a frumpy daughter and a dad going for a job interview. When he gets back, he tells her how he’s going to need… ‘more ties!’ and they both hop about joyously like utter dicks.

At first I thought this advert was stupid. Then I found it fantastically annoying. Then, somehow, it’s laughable quality gave it laugh-worthy quality and I ended up enjoying it. If I ever get bothered about my grey hair, one brand name is now very familiar to me.

It can take a lot to lodge something in a person’s brain. I’m not doing about a pick-axe or a spear here, I’m talking about advertising.

Different ads ‘bed in’ at different speeds. Generally, a person will need to see an advert a number of times for it to really have much of an impact. But how much is too much?

Because some advertising campaigns are highly targeted, you can find that you see the same ads again and again and again if you watch certain programmes regularly. When these ads become overfamiliar, they merely become irritating and this is the feeling your target audience ends up with.

Marketing isn’t just about raising awareness about your product. It’s about presenting it in the right way to the right people.

When I was in India recently, I spotted a worrying trend in the TV advertising there. As well as having ad breaks and various companies sponsoring each programme (often six or seven sponsors for one show) they also have these invasive ads that run during the thing that you’re watching.

The way it works is the main picture is shrunk slightly – like a window on the computer – and ads are presented along the bottom and side of the screen while the programme continues. I experience intense irritation whenever these ads are run. Is that the feeling you want associated with your brand?

Marketing is key, to generate cash in a business, you need a market, to achieve this, you need market share, for market share you need marketing. Without marketing you are finished, that’s right properly finished.

I think that some genius marketing techniques can give you the edge over your competition, although your budget might have to be up for it.

A good example is Comparethemarket.com using mere cats as their mascot if you can call it that, the good thing is that it works, Confused.com has been beaten well and truly here. They have even created a website for Comparethemerecat.com which incidentally sees a lot of traffic.

Take a look at this picture, who has got the edge, despite the fact they are not in direct competition with each other.

Hewlett Packard (HP) has made a bold claim by saying that emailing campaigns should be less which in turn can generate more business.

It’s about targeting the right people and existing clients with a tailored email to them rather than trying to increase the size of their databases.

They decided to contact some of their inactive clients in their database by using a different look to them and also some discounted offers in the hope to attract their attention, which proved a success.

“Your inactive subscribers don’t necessarily represent dead wood, uselessly clogging up your database.”

A comment from Marketing Direct .

Marketing to your existing clients is more likely to give you a much better return on your investment ran trying to generate new ones.

Megabus which is one of the UK low cost coach services have decided to market it’s self with a viral game.

The game will allow players to join a race on the motorway and give them some challenging routes that they offer 2 of their main routes like Leeds to Portsmouth and Glasgow to London while on the way they will have to dodge obstacles and pick up passengers.

One of the reasons behind the campaign is that most of all the tickets sold for Megabus are sold online and digital activity is very important to them.

Jodine Milne the marketing manager for Megabus had this to say

“The Megabus key messages, including the £1 fares plus 50p booking fee, are integrated throughout Mega Ride and there is a key link to the site at the end of the game. We are confident this will highlight our great value to potential and returning customers.”

They are hoping that this strong viral campaign will increase the awareness of the brand while at the same time target a wider audience.

British business have planned to increase their marketing budgets so they can market their ways out of the recession, out of 1,000 business approximately 38 per cent of them are going to spend more of their budget on their marketing campaigns.

They are also reducing their outgoing costs and have decided that the way forward it to bring many of their external costs in and making them in house.

Only a quarter of these businesses said that they would not bring these costs in house while 40 per said they would.

The biggest cost to the marketing budget was the cost of printing then following by their online advertising.

The brand manager for HP Officejet had this to say

“The survey results highlight how businesses are looking to reduce external costs through bringing printing requirements in-house, with the ability to produce professional quality print material themselves, rather than through an external supplier. When measured against equivalent laser printers, our new HP Officejet Pro printer series costs 50 per cent less to print per page, a not insignificant figure when looking at budget restraints and supplier consolidation,”

A recent report from BIGresearch and shop.org in July this year has outlined that consumers want the retailers to think about their marketing campaigns by remembering something about them when they target them and to make them more personal.

The language of the customer was the top of the list and then remembering log in and which country the shopper was from came in third.

The head of research said

“What struck me is that the top three items are very much fundamental – log me in, remember my language preference, know where I’m based.”

Companies should consider working with IT firms so that if these are not done they can possibly be integrated.