VIRAL MARKETING AS PART OF EFFECTIVE UNIVERSITY MARKETING STRATEGY

The ideas relating to the application of marketing principles in the management of universities thanks to the predatory competitive environment become established in the last decade. A growing number of universities as well as high interest in higher education, increasing level of mass teaching activities, reducing the number of applicants and the ongoing discussions about the quality of teaching are all important reasons for the development and implementation of marketing principles in the university management, which in turn can help confront and prevent problems.

The main objective of this article is to highlight the importance of marketing management of the universities and the needs for usage of new marketing communication tools, which include viral marketing. It represents word-of-mouth form of marketing in social and multimedia networks.

To verify the importance of the viral marketing deployment was carried out an experiment in which we measured the effects of viral marketing campaigns on university’s website traffic. We compared the effectiveness of three types of videos (the university’s official video, student´s video and animated viral video). Based on web audience measurement of target website it was found that the highest efficiency on Web traffic had viral video. Therefore, the universities should not only use the official promotional videos, but they have to use viral videos especially for communication with the external environment of the university. These viral videos are highly effective and efficient communication tools for successful management of the competition on the market of higher education (the fight for the students).