Wipro uses viral marketing to reach out to customers

Bangalore: Wipro, the third largest IT exporter in India is making use of viral marketing to reach out to customers, as the company successfully uploaded some of the company videos on YouTube and got many viewers visited the page within one week. The videos are intended to act as a primer to information showed on its website, reported Financial Chronicle.

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When Wipro uploaded its first video named Penguins and SOA story on YouTube on December 23, about 923 viewers viewed the page within three days. The animated clip uses Penguins and problem of constructing a housing structure to illustrate the benefits of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology. Viewers are provided a link to Wipro's website to get more information about the offerings.

People in the senior manager and VP levels who work for chief information officers of companies are the target audience of these videos. "The animated video is a way to get attention to a topic or service. It basically communicates that the company has some good stuff in this area, why don't you (interested viewer/client) come to my website and let's proceed further," said Jessie Paul, Chief Marketing Officer, Wipro.

He also mentioned that the uploaded Penguin clip had seen some success with an over three per
cent conversion rate of the video's viewers reaching out to the company's website.

Inspiring from the success of first video, Wipro is in process of making another Video on SOA to be uploaded in January 2009. The company is also planning to make similar films on like green IT and unified communications segments. Moreover, Wipro has recently paid to an official channel on YouTube to upload its videos.

Bangalore-based design firm Pepper Square is making such videos for Wipro and the budget for a single video production would be a little less than 1 lakh. "Spending more would not make sense since the video clips on networking sites had a small shelf-life of about one to three months," Paul added.

As most of the companies try to cut cost on travel and sales and marketing, marketing strategies like viral marketing, white papers and video presentations are expected to get priority among companies.

Methods such as viral marketing, white papers and video presentations, which define thought leadership in technology, are expected to increase in usage as Indian information technology firms try and cut costs on travel and sales & marketing budgets.