5 Tips For Creating A Viral Marketing Campaign

What is Viral Marketing?
When it comes to marketing techniques, almost none are as explosively successful as viral marketing. Viral marketing is any piece of content that one person sends to another—then that person sends it to another, and so on, until it catches momentum and basically becomes its own marketing phenomenon without any further assistance from the content’s originator—the ability to gather “eyeballs” simply grows on its own like a virus.

What makes marketing virally so special is that, once it catches on, the audience itself basically does the marketing for you, instead of you having to research a specific audience for what makes them tick (for the purpose of being able to strategically place your content in front of them). Then, once they pass the content on to each other, the odds of getting them to take action become greater, largely because the content was recommended by someone they trust—family, friends, co-workers, etc.

Also, in case you're wondering, viral marketing comes in just about every form of marketing or advertising. Viral content includes videos, podcast, articles, e-mails, images, print advertising, billboards, commercials, etc

5 tips for creating a viral campaign
1)    Create something enticing—people/consumers are mostly interested in things they can connect with emotionally—make them laugh, cry, scared, etc. any you’ll have their undivided attention. Show them something extremely useful, but in a boring way, and your call to action will suffer!

2)    Make your content easily sharable—make sure your audience can easily pass along whatever you’re looking to go viral. Simple “send to a friend” or "e-mail a friend" and/or social networking widgets (and like) go along way.

3)    Get involved in an online community—if you want people to notice your content, you need to go where people who actively share are. You’ve never seen a billboard hidden away in some off the map neighborhood—they’re always displayed where many people will see them.

4)    Test your efforts—expect to create more than one version of content. For example, when creating an ad for PPC, you want to make sure you try a few different versions of the ad, then test which ad is receiving the most clicks. The same is true when creating landing pages for a viral campaign (another example). Create a few different versions of the same page and test which one being passed along from consumer to consumer the most—that’s the one with the most viral potential.

5)    Expect no guarantees—perhaps one of the most important things to remember about viral marketing is that there are no guarantees. Since it’s the audience itself that chooses to pass your content on to others, there’s really no way of knowing what exactly it was about your ad, video, article etc. that enticed them to share--therefore you can't rely on your efforts to definitely go viral! The best you can do is confirm that you’ve added all the lovely ingredients needed for a piece of content to go viral—and hope for the best.

So there you have it, viral marketing 101; of course there are more advanced methods to this beast of marketing success, but these tips will help you get your feet wet.

Take care,

Dave

Google. (n.d.). Google Images. Retrieved on September 2, 2010 from http://acreativellc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/viral-marketing-tree.jpg