Every marketer’s dream is to go viral, to send an infographic or Gangnam Style-esque video spiraling across the Internet where it’s sure to return lots of attention (and hopefully revenue). Yet most marketers become frustrated when they attempt viral marketing campaigns. Many viral campaigns happen by pure chance. It’s common for marketers who experience viral campaigns to want to recreate that effect over and over. Actually making that happen is another story. You can tweak your viral marketing campaign for the new year to make your campaigns more susceptible to virility. While there’s no guarantee, the following tips to tweak your viral marketing campaign could have you seeing viral numbers in your near future.
Recreate Your Headlines
One of the best tips to tweak your viral marketing campaign is to work on creating the most engaging headlines. Most of your viral marketing campaign elements start with a headline. Articles, press releases, videos and all other elements, the end user typically sees a headline before they view the rest of your content. For this reason, you’ll want to spend a lot of time creating and recreating your headlines. The experts advise that you write 25 headlines for each piece. Then, you merely choose the best one that you think may result in viral traffic numbers.
Other tips for creating viral headlines include:
- Leave Your Traffic Guessing: Don’t give everything away with your title. Make your visitors click-through to receive the whole enchilada.
- Leave Your Opinions to Yourself: Let your visitors form their own opinions. It’s typical for bloggers and video marketers to put their own opinions into their creations. Let your visitors make their own evaluations for more a more viral marketing campaign.
- Push Boundaries: Don’t be so predictable. Come up with headlines that raise eyebrows, that cause your visitors to look twice and that cause them to sweat a little. You’ve got once chance with your viral marketing campaign for the new year, just make sure you don’t go too far. Test your boundaries and then push them whenever possible.
Make Your Content Easy to Pass Around
When you write a blog, ask people to tweet it and provide a Twitter link. Or ask people to share it on Facebook and then provide an easy way to do so. The easier you make it to spread your materials around, the more likely it will be for your campaigns to go viral. If you follow any tips to tweak your viral marketing campaign, it’s to make things easy-peasy. Put social marketing links on your website and right after your content so that sharing your materials becomes as easy as point and click.
Go Controversial/Funny/Sentimental
Many viral marketing campaigns evoke a certain feeling in the end user. The piece is either infuriating, in which case the person passes it around to show others how vile it is. Or it could be sentimental, in which case the person passes it around to show others their softer side. Some viral marketing campaigns are funny, which appeals to all of us who like to laugh. The point is, if you’re looking for tips to tweak and beef up your viral marketing campaign, it’s to try and evoke a certain type of feeling in your end users.
Sad, happy, anger-inducing, jealousy, or any other feeling. If you can bring emotion out of your viewers/readers/visitors, you’ll have done your job is a viral marketing campaign manager.
The Ability to Relate
If you will notice, most viral marketing campaigns resonate with nearly everyone. The latest viral marketing campaign for the new year may have something to do with child rearing, something most everyone has some experience with or opinion on. It may have to do with drinking and driving, drinking in general, birthday parties, adopting a pet from the humane society, merely owning a pet or it could be something as simple as girl and boy get together.
With so many ideas for viral marketing campaigns, you only have to stretch your imagination to find something that works.
Of course, you never know what’s going to work until you try it out. The lesson here is to dig into your audience’s psyche, find out what motivates them, what holds them back and what makes them get out of bed each morning and you may have your next viral marketing campaign.
There is no cookie cutter mold for the perfect viral marketing campaign. It happens to some campaigns and not others. In fact, most campaigns that have gone viral probably wouldn’t have the same success today. Viral marketing campaigns have to contain just the right subject matter and they have to strike at just the right time. Find that magic formula and you just might succeed at launching a viral campaign for the new year.
Remember to work on your headlines, make your campaigns easy to pass around and evoke emotion whenever you can. And whatever you do, don’t stop trying. You never know when that one campaign may travel far and wide.
