The Ultimate Guide On Viral Marketing
Social media marketing for companies has come a long way.
The audience’s inherent need to share what they like with their friends and family has compelled brands to promote their content, hoping for it to inspire awe and excitement so it can go viral.
Viral marketing has become a powerful channel to get their audience talking and sharing their content.
Rightfully, brands want to get their content and campaigns in front of their followers to raise brand awareness which is the primary goal of digital marketers. This is why it is imperative for businesses to leverage the opportunity that viral marketing has to present.
More than 3.6 billion people use social media globally. The figure is projected to grow to 4.41 billion by 2025, which makes it indispensable for businesses looking for ways to mass-target their audience through digital platforms.
What Is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing, also known as word of mouth marketing, refers to creating visual content or video that resonates with the respective target audience. It offers information about a company’s products and services via messages that spread like a virus, i.e., rapidly from person to person.
The idea is to create content that users would love to share with others.
A viral marketing campaign can significantly augment engagement, sales, and brand when done right.
Social networks are a natural habitat for such marketing collateral because only they offer the speed and ease of sharing that no other platform does. You’ll find that viral content is usually surprising, evocative, emotional, and funny or unique enough to elicit a reaction from the viewer.
This means that making such universally appealing posts or videos isn’t going to be easy.
Also, when attempting viral marketing, understand that virality is a double-edged sword. Your campaign might be misinterpreted, or worse, become a joke and get parodied across video platforms. But that’s a risk worth taking because viral can work wonders for your brand when done right.
Attributes of A Viral Marketing Campaign
All marketers want their efforts to pay off and their campaign to go viral, so it is widely accepted, influential, and recognized. However, there is no predefined formula for building such a plan.
But the best viral marketing campaigns have some features in common.
Appeal to the Intended Audience
A well-versed viral marketing campaign centers on the intended target audience. For your campaign to circulate, you need to make sure that it connects and resonates with your target audience. Your content should inspire them to share it with friends, followers, and family.
Furthermore, it is essential to determine your target audience in the initial stages of your campaign formation. In order to achieve this, you need to ask the following questions to yourself:
- Who do you want to connect with?
- What content would interest them or they’ll feel passionate about?
- What are their dreams, hopes, and values?
- Why would they expect from your campaign?
- What elements or content topics can make them share that with their social network?
Strong Visual Strategy
A robust visual approach is paramount when it comes to viral marketing campaigns as it guides prospective customers to understand and gauge your brand with the help of images.
A campaign communicates a story. The best way to narrate an account is to add visually appealing elements that perfectly resonate with your target audience.
Your visual strategy needs to align with your audience and brand — it should be relevant, informative, engaging, and include some intriguing elements, such as hope and humor.
Creativity and Innovation
Think about some of the top-performing viral marketing campaigns. What sets them apart from other campaigns?
A marketing campaign doesn’t go viral until they have an attractive, innovative, and unique idea behind them — your campaign should pique the audience’s interest. It has to be attention-grabbing and different.
Emotional Appeal
It is imperative for your campaign to appeal and connect with the audience on a more profound and personal level. For example, Dove’s campaign called the Real Beauty Sketches makes you feel insecure yet confident, frustrated but strong, all within a few minutes.
This video campaign centers on a message related to self-esteem and natural beauty. It shows that beauty is diverse and powerful in every shape and form. So it’s no wonder that the campaign quickly started trending because of its emotional appeal and relatability.
You need to create content that resonates with your target audience, making them feel something; otherwise, they might not want to share it.
Easy to Promote and Share
Thanks to social media and the internet, promoting and sharing your content with your followers is almost effortless. Creating videos and photo content that’s readily consumed by a broad audience base doesn’t have to be expensive.
If you want your campaign and content to go viral, it is essential that your audience shares it over and over again. This denotes that your brand needs to make the content available first on as many platforms and — in multiple ways possible. That way, you make it easier for your audience to share it with their acquaintances.
Furthermore, make sure you enable embedding, sharing, downloading, and other capabilities on your content. That’ll help your viewers promote your content on their social networks, tag their friends on Facebook, Instagram, or maybe download the video to turn your content into a GIF. Create CTAs or elements that entice people to share your content with their friends.
Publish at The Right Time
Along with the content, it is also imperative to consider the date and time when and at what time you plan to share your content. Marketers leverage the holiday seasons such as Christmas or significant events, like the Super Bowl and the presidential race, to their advantage.
As more people scroll through their feeds on digital platforms, watch TV, and keep up with the ongoing events, marketers invest more time, effort, and money in their campaigns.
For instance, you run your campaign on a Saturday night when most people are out celebrating the weekend or have plans with friends. This means that they will not browse their social newsfeed … as they do on Wednesday nights before falling asleep.
How to Begin with Viral Marketing?
Now that you have the grip over the fundamentals of viral marketing, it’s time to get ahead and go advanced. Specifically, various ways can help you start your viral marketing campaign.
Here are some actionable tips for creating a viral marketing campaign with share-worthy content:
Reflect on your Goals and Objectives
A significant challenge for brands is not knowing and having clear goals and purposes for grabbing everyone’s attention on their social media feed.
For example, are you vying for brand mentions, brand awareness, or trying to captivate your customers’ attention?
When you align your viral marketing attempts with your goals, it helps create valuable and meaningful that’s bound to make an impact instead of hoping that your next post sticks.
You need to have an effective plan of action for your viral campaigns, and content is no different. Therefore, it is vital to have a clear set of goals that you want to accomplish and the purpose of running a campaign and making it viral.
Make use of Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags and their analysis go hand in hand with social media engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares. For easy sharing and awareness, adding a hashtag to your campaigns is an effective way to make it more memorable, trending, and visible in front of your audience.
Take time to make a relevant hashtag and tack it to your post. That’ll make it possible for you to monitor your campaign’s performance and effectiveness in terms of shares and mentions.
With Mentionlytics hashtag analytics, you can get a detailed report on your hashtags, making it easier to gauge their success. Additionally, you can also discover other trending hashtags by your industry’s competitors while incorporating the right approach for your future posts and campaigns.
Through social listening tools like Mentionlytics, you can get insights in real-time and comprehend whether it has relevance to your audience or not.
Hashtags that your audience can connect with or relate to maximizes your engagement and reach on social platforms significantly. Therefore, it is vital to leverage useful hashtags in your campaigns.
Social media monitoring tools provide you with data-driven insights into your audience’s preferences following the hashtags. It enables you to know about the ones that propelled the level of interaction and engagement.
Leverage Social Media Reporting Tools
Your audience plays a central role when it comes to running social media campaigns. Whether you want to create or curate viral content, you will have to know what your followers connect with and the kind of content they can resonate with.
But how can you figure that out? First off, gauge the pieces of content that have performed well during the past campaigns by monitoring the following social media metrics:
- Performance and keyword traffic
- Audience engagement
- Clicks and reach
- Page impressions
- Demographic data
The above-mentioned social media metrics can provide you with invaluable insights into your audience’s likes and shareable potential.
Perhaps it’s a meme. Maybe it’s a video.
Regardless of social media analytics provided by Mentionlytics, you can find out perceptions about your services, products, and overall brand on digital platforms. You can get an exhaustive report on the customer behaviors, patterns, and interests around your brand.
Furthermore, you can also get to know your specific pieces of content, campaigns, and effectiveness. That way, you can begin to plan your upcoming campaigns depending on what works for you and help you get likes.
Create Well Rounded and Shareable Content
Ensure that your content optimization strategy is on point and allows your audience to share your videos and posts easily and quickly.
For instance, social media campaigns shouldn’t be limited to your brand’s core account. From newsletters and blogs to in-person sessions in your network, gauge how far you circulate your message, and it will be impactful.
Next, brainstorm the top-performing social media platforms for any given piece of content or promotional campaigns. For example, visually appealing content works for Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Viral video content is prime for TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
Level Up Your Digital Marketing Game
All your social media efforts go in vain if you don’t track and measure your viral campaigns’ effectiveness and the overall brand.
Quantifying the results is critical to a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. It is vital to evaluate how your content performs so you can make better decisions about its future.
Mentionlytics, a feature-rich social listening tool, allows you to monitor all the crucial metrics. It provides you an all-inclusive social media performance report that covers essential aspects such as your content reach, engagement, re-shares, and more.
Ready to take your social media marketing campaigns to the next level on all the popular social media platforms? Mentionlytics can help provide exhaustive analytics reports to improve your brand popularity and visibility.
Originally posted on Mentionlytics :
https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/viral-marketing-ultimate-guide
