The dream of any marketer is to create a viral marketing campaign. When you are able to create a video, image, e-report or any other marketing piece that spreads just like an actual virus, you’ll know you’ve hit the big time. Creating a viral marketing campaign is much easier said than done. However, you can stack your deck and put the odds in your favor by keeping these viral marketing tips in mind.
The Big Idea
Very few people come up with a viral marketing campaign on the fly. At the same time, you can’t really plan for a viral campaign either. Nobody can predict why or when a particular piece will go viral. All you can do is plan, make sure your viral marketing campaign is put together to the best of your ability and hope for the best.
For anything to go viral, however, it must resonate with a large group of people on a major scale. For instance, a funny video depicting a dog singing a famous pop song might get passed around on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The video makes people laugh, which all people love to do, many people love dogs and pop songs are called that because they’re popular. That video has all the elements of a viral marketing campaign. The following should help you come up with viral marketing pieces of your own.
- Relevant: Your marketing campaigns should always be relevant to your niche and it should appeal to the interests of your primary audience. For example, if your marketing a veterinarian’s office, you might have an animation of a talking cat discussing funny trips to the vet’s office. The more relevant the piece is to your overall niche and brand, the more likely the piece is to resonate with your audience.
- Funny, Thought-Provoking And/Or Intriguing: Your video should make your audience laugh, think or it should surprise them in some way. Think outside the box, be different and consider what types of viral marketing campaigns your audience would love to pass around.
- Current Events: Many viral marketing pieces have been shared on a mass scale because they were created based on some type of current event. Keep an eye on the news and the conversations on social networks and on popular Internet forums to see what everyone’s talking about. Then put that subject matter into a viral marketing campaign and you just might find a winner.
- Study Viral Marketing Success Stories: If you want to know what types of pieces go viral, you might want to study those who have come before you. While those same viral marketing campaigns aren’t likely to go viral twice, they can give you some ideas of what works and what doesn’t.
Once you have a few viral marketing ideas in mind, you’ll want to put the following techniques into practice to stretch the viral effect even further.
Clean and Polished: When you have your marketing materials completed, check them over thoroughly and get second and third opinions if you have to. The last thing you want to do is release your viral marketing materials only to find that you made a mistake or that you got your facts wrong, or any other blunder. Just like carpenters measure twice and cut once, you should always do a thorough check and edit of your viral marketing pieces before they are shared online.
Share Far And Wide: You should be using all resources available to you if you hope for your pieces to spread across the Internet like some viral infection. You should be using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, video sharing sites, photo sharing sites, blogging platforms and anything else you can find. The more you share, the more likely your pieces are to go viral.
Get Help: Hopefully you have established a great relationship with your email list subscribers and your social media friends and followers. When you have your viral marketing materials completed and ready to go, ask for help from your audience in spreading the word. Give them the materials to share on their social media sites and to their own list subscribers, if they have any. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. After all, no viral marketing campaign was ever the result o
f a single effort. Viral marketing requires an entire group of people acting together. You never know, asking for help might be the catalyst that takes your pieces further than you ever expected.
That’s the magic of viral marketing. You never know when it will happen and usually it happens when you least expect it, but if put these tips and techniques to work for you, you will soon see why all marketers want their campaigns to go viral. When you see how much attention, traffic and revenue you can generate from a single widely popular campaign, you’ll want to create viral pieces again and again. Will lightning strike twice? Put these tips into action and it could be like holding a lightning rod in a thunder storm.
