Viral marketing: What is it?
Any strategy that quickly spreads a company’s marketing message online or off is known as viral marketing. A product, service, or brand is promoted using current distribution channels through the use of viral marketing as a business strategy. The behaviour is comparable to how a virus spreads from one person to the next, rapidly enthralling a sizable audience either locally or globally.
Benefits of Viral Advertising
Companies who engage in viral marketing might achieve a lot from this activity, although typically during a short period of time. This is closely tied to the concept of “15 minutes of fame.” The following are some advantages of viral marketing:
- Little to no advertising expenses – Since your audience will automatically share your content, you won’t need to spend money promoting it.
- An increase in brand awareness would occur if your company found or produced content about your items that was so compelling that many people wanted to share it. Those shares make your company and products memorable to new potential clients.
- Brand trustworthiness- A great piece of viral content, whether it be a news article, picture, animated gif, video, podcast, or something else, will either persuade the customer to buy your product or make a memorable impression on them that will make them think of your online store first the next time they consider buying the products you sell.
- Accelerated growth of inbound leads – As your widely shared information spreads online, you are sure to attract more visitors to your website and customers than ever before. Make sure you have a strategy in place for this kind of promotion so that your leads don’t languish in a fruitless funnel.
A Successful Viral Marketing Campaign Has These Five Components
It’s not necessary to be complex to use viral marketing. Before beginning to plan your viral marketing campaign, you must assess whether it will outperform more traditional marketing efforts. If you follow these guidelines, anyone, from a small business owner running an internet store to a major corporation, may develop a successful viral marketing campaign.
1. Research
The first thing you should do becomes familiar with the kinds of content that connect most strongly with the people who buy the things you sell and the individuals most likely to spread viral content about your product to those people. The most popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, start with the most popular content.
The trending content pages for the relevant social networks, search engines, and news networks can be used to do your study. You may get a basic idea of the kinds of content that appeal to a wide audience from these. You will also get a glimpse into the kinds of viral content that aid in mass product promotion.
Finding the most viral content that appeals to your target market may require you to narrow your search, depending on the product(s) you sell. Using hashtags or keyword searches on each network is the fastest approach to find some topic-specific viral content. For example, Instagram will show you the most popular posts, then the most recent posts, for the chosen Instagram hashtags.
Following relevancy, results from keyword searches on YouTube are sorted by popularity. If they have any relevant videos, verified YouTube channels will usually be at the head of the pack. Twitter prioritizes messages from verified Twitter users at the top of the relevancy and popularity rankings for keyword and hashtag searches.
You may see what users see on each network when they search for keywords or hashtags related to the goods your company sells by performing identical searches on other popular networks. You will have a decent chance of appearing in searches done by your target audience if you can provide viral content for such networks.
2. Discover or Create
Finding or producing content that has the potential to become viral is the next step in viral marketing. It must be of excellent quality and include a product you offer. You must invest time and resources into producing top-notch content if you want others to share it.
Create a strong call to action towards the top of the text and conduct keyword research to optimize for search engines. This will help readers understand what to do with the information. Determine the network(s) you want to go viral on and the kind of content that will help you do so using the notes you took during the first step’s study.
Then either publish that content yourself or have it published somewhere that can help it go viral. See what components best produce viral content for your intended audience by consulting your research.
Half the work is already done for you if you have found some content that can be used to market your business. Let’s imagine that while doing your study, you came across the animated GIF of colored pencils that became popular on Reddit and Imgur.
Determine the network(s) you want to go viral on and the kind of content that will help you do so using the notes you took during the first step’s study. Then either publish that content yourself or have it published somewhere that can help it go viral. Once more, review your data to determine which components produce the most viral content for your intended audience.
3. Pre-Launch Advertising
Strategies for viral marketing frequently overlook the campaign’s pre-launch stage. Starting a dialogue online with the majority of your audience in order to generate buzz about the campaign before it launches is a simple approach to guarantee that a viral marketing campaign will go viral. Create a strategy with your coworkers to start the dialogue.
To assist spread the news to as many people as possible, you might even include affiliates or connected businesses who could profit from promoting the campaign. What does this accomplish? This will increase conversation and spark interest among more individuals, giving your campaign a great start at a lower expense. Pre-launch can occasionally be just as crucial as the promotion phase, from starting a teaser campaign to creating anticipation through social media content.
Pre-launch advertising options include:
- Running a competition – Choose a prize that your followers would be motivated to share and enter. Post it via email and social media, emphasizing your branding and some upcoming announcement. To take advantage of the volume of traffic the video will receive, have the winner revealed via Facebook Live or another channel alongside the product launch.
- Free trials: Offer the general public or brand evangelists free trials so they can test the product before launch. Encourage them to share their product reviews online to start a discussion on their social networks.
- Product-teaser mini-commercials: To pique interest, post micro ads on your website and throughout social media. An excellent technique to pique their interest is to discuss specifics of your upcoming product and how it might assist your clients in solving their problems.
- Guest blogging: Research the best sources and create an article for them about the launch. To entice readers to click and read, tease out features, the debut date, and some important statistics.
- Beta testing: Find prominent influencers who are willing to test your new product in beta and entice them to write reviews and share their opinions about it before it hits the market. They will be able to share “classified” information with their followers, which will make them feel good and make them curious about the goods. Prior to the product going live, make sure that any defects or misunderstandings that were found during this phase have been fixed. It might develop into a blog about lessons learned!
- Branded hashtags: Using these is a terrific strategy to promote your business since as the hashtag gains popularity, a larger audience will be exposed to the content. It will receive greater attention and awareness of your product launch the more people who see it.
- Once you have completed all of these tasks, you can unwind before the launch, which is when the real virality begins.
4. Promote
The promotion of a potentially viral piece of content is the most important aspect of any viral marketing effort. While some sorts of content, like a review of a product you offer in a well-known journal, will gain popularity automatically, other types of content require encouragement to become viral.
As was already said, the majority of platforms use an algorithm to choose which content is labelled as viral, trending, popular, or hot content. The majority of the time, these algorithms consider how much engagement a piece of content receives in connection to when it was released or inside a certain time period. Imagine your viral marketing objective was to produce a video that appeared on YouTube’s Trending rankings.
Make sure that the majority of your promotion efforts are carried out as soon as the content is uploaded in order to ensure that it has the possibility to become viral on the main social channels. This will make sure that when it comes to algorithms for trending content, recency is on your side. After that, all you need is interaction with your content across as many platforms as you can to get it to critical mass.
You may streamline the promotion process by making a checklist before the big promotion day. You should put the following items on your list of promotion strategies.
- Social Media Posts – Use the most pertinent hashtags when posting your content on your branded social media networks.
- Employee advocacy – Motivate staff members to distribute your content by reposting articles from your social media pages under your company’s name.
- Create an email newsletter or blast for your customer database using your content for email marketing.
- Reach out to the most well-known figures in your field to see if they would be willing to share your work with their audience.
- Paid Promotion – As soon as the content is published, target audiences with search and social media advertising.
- Get involved in social media groups, forums, and Q&A networks where your content may receive more exposure.
Because their audience drives their content forward, companies that start with a huge following are more likely to achieve viral content fame naturally (without paid strategies). Businesses that are just getting started and have a smaller audience may want to spend money on sponsored advertising techniques to make sure that their content is seen by as many people as possible and spread as rapidly as possible.
5. Campaign Monitoring
With viral marketing initiatives, it is even more difficult to determine when a campaign has truly been successful. Even if you obtain a lot of free attention and visitors to your website, the campaign’s effectiveness is debatable if the goal was to boost sales and this wasn’t accomplished.
Success metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are crucial in today’s marketing departments, and their establishment must take place from the planning stage. To truly appreciate the success of your campaign, keep an eye on these numbers in the days after its launch. This can assist you with real-time activity optimization so you can maximize your efforts.
Viral Marketing Types
From a marketing standpoint, “going viral” can happen in many different ways. A customized strategy that incorporates one or more viral marketing channels is crucial because there are no viral marketing strategies that are effective for all sectors. Videos are the most popular method, but posts on social media, SERPs, email marketing campaigns, and even TV commercials have helped businesses create viral, trending content—either on design or by mistake.
Viral marketing comes in many forms, but it can generally be divided into three groups: content made by a company about its products, content made by others about a company’s products, and content that companies pay influencers to make about their products through sponsorship and advertising. To demonstrate the range of options you have, we discuss various forms of viral marketing below.
1. Viral Video Content
Depending on the platform they use, numerous avenues for viral content to reach consumers exist. Users of YouTube, for instance, can search trending videos. In accordance with YouTube Help, the platform assesses indicators such as a video’s view count, rate of view increase, source of views (such as YouTube search results as opposed to an embedded video in a blog post), and the date the video was posted.
However, these are not the only indicators that aid in a video’s ascent to the day’s trending charts. In addition to likes and dislikes, comments, and – most crucially – the duration of user viewing, YouTube also gathers additional interaction data for videos. “The video with the greatest view count on a given day may not be #1 on Trending, and films with more views may be placed below videos with fewer views,” they clearly mention.
The outcome? Videos about current events, entertainment news, and other popular subjects that are tailored to the YouTube user’s interests are interspersed with product advertisements and reviews from companies, the media, and consumers.
2: Online Viral Content
Similar to other video platforms, Facebook’s native video platform can show users the most well-liked content related to their personal and general interests in the trending videos section of the Facebook website or app and in the news feed.
The content that each user sees on Facebook is determined by the algorithm, and in 2018, Facebook wants to give users “…less public content like postings from businesses, brands, and media.” As a result, publishers and people tend to produce more trending content than businesses. Naturally, a product receives a lot of attention when it is mentioned in Facebook trending content.
Similar algorithms may be used by Instagram, a Facebook property, to choose the kinds of popular content that show up in a user’s news feed or Explore tab. Compared to Facebook, smaller companies seem to be better able to trend on Instagram utilizing viral content, however, publishers and individuals may start to take the lead there as well.
3. Organic Viral Content
Not simply the most popular social networks drive traffic from viral content. SERPs, or search engine results pages, can provide you with an advantage. If you can’t rank for a term with heavy competition in Google search results, for instance, you might be able to get your product mentioned in content from a publisher who can do so through Google News.
The diversity, freshness, textual relevance to the search and uniqueness of the content are all taken into account by the Google News algorithm. As a result, a link to your online store in a product review from a magazine like Wired may be the kind of viral content that drives a lot of referral traffic to your website.
4. Viral Email Marketing
Email campaigns that stand out and evoke feelings are excellent for encouraging subscribers to share with others. Your email campaign will go viral if you include calls to action and worthwhile information that is timely and closely tied to what your readers care about.
It is crucial to segment your audience in order to give the finest content to them. You should also include clear calls to action so that subscribers don’t have to worry about what they should do with your message in a world where only 20% of subscribers check email newsletters.
Conclusion
As a result, when used properly, viral marketing can greatly increase interest in your company and its products. When you produce incredible content that you know your clients will adore, you provide folks with the resources they need to generate fantastic virtual word-of-mouth traffic for your company. The people who will need to purchase your items in the future will at the very least remember your company’s name.
