How to Succeed at Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is a very exciting term to businesses. Generally, they often think that a viral marketing campaign will cost little to nothing, be easy, and see a massive return.
A seasoned marketer knows that this is not the case.
This is not to say that a piece of content can’t go viral organically. There are very rare instances of that happening. For a majority of viral marketing, it takes a great deal of time, effort and money to successfully have something go viral.
One of the often overlooked things that will help you go viral is choosing a demographic that actually makes something go viral. If your demographic is older and not tech savvy, then there is little to no opportunity for them to populate your content all over the internet. Therefore, pick a younger demographic that tends to spend a lot of time online.
The second step in going viral is to create great content for that demographic. This is where a marketing and business team needs to collaborate with content creators, which so many fail to do. Content creators are better at making something that is more entertaining and engaging than someone who specializes in analytics.
Once your viral marketing piece has been created, then you have to refine it. Make it perfect! Or at least as near perfect as time and budget will allow.
From here, you launch your viral marketing campaign and then the hard work begins. This is the step most businesses stumble because they feel that they have done all the work and it should go viral from there. However, creation of the piece is only 20% of the equation. The rest of the equation is the promotion of the viral marketing content.
This promotion will vary depending on your platform, budget and goals. Some promotions that are very useful are as follows.
Spend on social media – With the targeting capacity of Facebook, you can get your content in front of the people that will share and respond to it. From there, you will see organic growth, but first you have to get it in front of them.
Press release – Depending on the content, this is a great way to get a significant amount of buzz started. It also will generate positive SEO towards the content, driving more views.
Outreach – Blogs, reddit, influencers. All of these are examples of things that you can show your content to that can then disseminate it to your target demographic.
Remember, viral marketing is not easy nor is it assured. It can be high risk high reward, but regardless, it will be a significant amount of work!
