Investigating and prioritizing the viral marketing key success factors

Viral marketing is a marketing policy that spreads a company’s marketing messages such as new brands or services by word of mouth. It is meant to offer the facility free to the people and allowing them to transfer it to others. The purpose of this research is to identify the key factors affecting the success of viral marketing and prioritize these factors. Based on the study of existing literature on the subject area, we prepared a list of key success factors and distributed a questionnaire to 125 active managers of Iranian capital market asking them to review and complete it with regard to Iran’s capital market conditions. Then we used Analytical Hierarchy Process technique that is considered as an important approach in this type of marketing. The research results show that 19 factors are influential to the success of active agencies. These factors eventually were classified into six key factors. The most important were message content, correct targeting, penetration characteristics of a message, technology involved, relationship with product, entertainment and validity and reliability of the message respectively.