Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing is the newest phoneme in marketing these days. Anything that can generate interest and the potential sale of a brand through messages that spreads like wildfire, from person to person, using social media platforms is called viral marketing.

Every brand and business craves to have a viral content in its arsenal. It is just not the popularity attached to the message which makes the content to go viral.  Popular content can only boom at once, but the viral content tends is memorable and becomes etched into the society’s consciousness and likely to be shared across space and time.

Related: Viral Campaigns & its advantages for Small Businesses

The virality of viral marketing :

The modes through which viral marketing happens is not restricted to social media alone. It could gather pace through Video, SMS, word of mouth, and other social methods to spread information about the Service, product, content, or brand.

The functioning of viral marketing is different from how mass media works. Here, many people have involved in marketing you without realizing, then you have gone viral. Since the competition is growing rapidly, and current technology helping us to make viral marketing easier, people’s attention span has become shorter.

By learning the best practices in viral marketing, you could be a step ahead of your competition when it comes to making your content viral frequently. We present to you some tips that could help you.

  • Feature an amazing product or service: The chances of going viral are dense if you have a great product and service. If your product taps into a customers’ genuine pain points, your product will be perceived to be superior relative to the products and services present currently in the market. When consumers like a product they have tested, they love talking about these products and services. Their word of mouth can make your business go viral.
  • Community building: Always build a community before a  product or a service is launched to generate interest around the product amongst the consumers. It is recommended that the community is built during the product developmental stage itself. Letting your customers early into the process makes them feel like stakeholders and co-creators. These customers can help your product development with their valuable feedback.
  • Support word of mouth: Word-of-mouth works wonders for a small-time set up to grow big. It is also a good way of referral marketing. Provide people with incentives for people engaging in recommending your offering through word-of-mouth. ONPASSIVE and Dropbox are classic examples of this.
  • Understand where your traffic comes from: Have access to clear data to understand which model works best for your product and which doesn’t. This saves you your time, resources and effort in the long run. Determine how new users are discovering your business, products, and services. Tools like Google Analytics can show you a Traffic overview for your website and shows where your traffic comes from.
  • Keep it simple:  You want your product or service to go viral? Then apply the principles of a ‘virus’. The ability of a virus to replicate fast and easily. Use simple mediums or formats to spread the message amongst more people. Also make sure the idea is unique, valuable and simple. Once the product appeals to the people, they will share it to make it viral.
  • Update your ideas’ list: After determining which viral strategy or method works best, try jotting down your ideas and build them and keep a track of them. When you think the time is ripe and your ideas have finally started to make sense, bring them to life.
  • Relevant and timely:  Bank on ideas that are fresh in the minds of the people. Anchor your campaign around current trends, events and issues to make it relatable with people.
  • Optimize every step of your funnel: Invest and create in the right sharing buttons, correct text, catchy and unique hashtag, amongst other features. Make social sharing easier for people. Try minimizing the clicks to share and this will yield unprecedented sharing success for sure.  
  • Take a side and fight for it: You cannot please everyone at all times. Remember, marketing is working with people’s emotions and each individual has a different perspective of the same event in question. By taking sides, you can help in creating a strong opinion and inspire people’s emotions and also channelize it. Rest assured, it will engage people for sure.
  • Doing the unexpected: We all love surprises. People will take notice when you do something which is least expected. Promote your product with a different perspective and the consumers will take time to think about it.
  • Advertising, a strict no-no: Ads go viral because of the great content or stories they contain in them and not because they are ads. If you get that connection right between people and the brand, there’s no stopping from going viral. Keep your promotion subtle and focus on the story that you want to create.
  • Make sharing easy: Viral marketing is all about sharing. So make your campaign easy to share with people. Let them download and embed your content. Let them share your content through emails, social media and whatever mode and channels possible.

We have discussed the reasons for content going viral in a series of previous blogs. Do refer to them. In conclusion, viral marketing is not conventional marketing. Creativity and focus in your approach can get the right results instead of making grand gestures. Like we have stated above in the blog, popularity and virality are two different things and cannot be confused as same. Virality lasts long while popularity fades off.

Related: Techniques to Boost Your Brand on Social Media