The ultimate goal of every marketer is to spread the word of their brand and to make its content go viral.
Viral Marketing is one of those successful marketing strategies which are specially designed for product promotion. This ultimately relies on the audience to generate the message of a product or service where it rapidly spreads like a virus among people in a very short span of time.
The advent of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have greatly contributed to the success of viral marketing.
If your business is unable to exploit the best out of this fact then you are missing out on countless visitors to your website or blog.
Viral marketing is an emerging sector and it is important for companies to understand how it works. This will help them to evaluate the contribution this type of campaign makes to a firm’s overall marketing communications.
Going viral might seem a little difficult to marketers, but by following certain key tactics, you can definitely crack the viral marketing code.
Some viral marketing strategies stand out to be better than others. Let’s dig into a few crucial elements that are necessary to be present in those strategies that make them superior to others.
A specific digital marketing strategy need not contain all these elements, but the more elements it holds, the more powerful the results are likely to be.
Elements of an effective viral marketing strategy
1. Give Away Valuable Products or Services
Who doesn’t like a free product? I don’t think there’s anyone like that. “Free” is the strongest word in marketer’s vocabulary which acts like a magnet in attracting most of the target audience. The best way to get your audience’s attention is to give them something for free.
This can be an initial step in creating brand awareness. Later when you offer the same product for the money, people will end up buying it if they actually liked the initial product. Hence, greater sales!
The most viral marketing programs have benefitted by using the “Free” component in their campaigns. Now, it is your time.
There is no such fixed date when you might start profiting from this campaign, but profits will eventually come your way in the long run.
2. Exploits Common Motivations & Behaviours
A smart viral marketing strategy exploits best out of human motivations. People are driven by greed and aspire to stand out.
Moreover, they crave to be popular, loved and understood. If you can outline a campaign which draws upon these common motivations and behaviors, we clearly have a winner.
While creating a Viral Marketing campaign, ensure to hit the pain point of the target audience and give them a solution to their problems.
3. Makes the Campaign Easy to Share
The Internet makes instant communication easy and is quite cost-effective. This is why viral marketing works prominently on the internet. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. And your message should exactly be like a virus that spreads across your target audience at a lightning speed.
The message you want to put across should be allowed to be shared, embedded on other sites and downloaded to spread it across the internet. There should not be any kind of terms and conditions when it comes to sharing the message.
You can utilize various social media platforms to get your message heard and shared. Moreover, simplify your message so that the audience can understand it in one read and this will encourage them to share it with others.
4. Scales Easily from Small to Large
To spread your message like wildfire, the media you choose to use for your viral marketing should be able to be complement both small and large campaigns.
This will give you multiple options for spreading your message. You must implicate scalability in your viral model and should regularly test the metrics that work perfectly for small and large campaigns.
5. Takes Advantage of What’s Available
The existing communication networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter are still remarkably popular. They are perfect platforms that help you to have your company brand shared with millions of people at just ease of a click.
With the advent & increasing popularity of social media, many of the relationships of an average person with his acquaintances are now connected online. This makes it easier to connect with a wider audience while developing a viral campaign.
6. Make Use of Other Resources as Well
You can implement your viral marketing plan by making use of some affiliate programs. For example, you can place text or graphic links on other websites.
Adding to this, a news release can be picked up by hundreds of publications and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or web page is communicating your marketing message.
Thus, apart from marketing your viral campaigns on your website and social media handles, you can also use other websites and resources to highlight your viral campaign.
The secret to viral marketing is that 99% of the time it is completely planned by the companies that benefit from it. Only rarely does something go viral accidentally. Going viral is normally the result of a coordinated marketing campaign. Companies doing that have often planned things out months ahead and carefully coordinate which articles go live when using a content calendar.
How to Measure the Success of Your Viral Marketing Campaign?
Traditional online marketing efforts are often measured in terms of page views and clicks, but viral campaigns are more complicated & have various measuring metrics.
They offer the opportunity to gather a fuller picture of what users are doing as they interact with the messaging and content of viral campaigns. To justify your investment, the most significant thing is to analyze the associated results.
There are a few metrics on the basis of which you can evaluate your performance. Some of them are:
1. Lead Generation
One of the most obvious & important ways to determine the success of a viral marketing campaign is to record whether the targeted qualified leads are generated or not. If you have generated the desired number of qualified leads, an increase in brand awareness is already achieved.
2. Brand Exposure
The second and foremost way to measure the success of your viral marketing campaign is through user behavior & interaction with the campaign. Educating and exciting users about a brand, product, offer or service. The experience is designed to reach as many relevant eyeballs as possible. Keep those eyeballs engaged for a significant amount of time.
3. Conversion
The third metric that can be used to determine the success of your viral marketing campaign is the number of conversions. This is done by making the users follow the Call-To-Action. Getting the user to do something, like making a purchase, signing up for a service, subscribing to a newsletter, or visiting a destination, i.e. the action you want them to do.
Conclusion
If you are not using online viral marketing techniques then you are putting your own business at a disadvantage by missing out on millions of visitors to your website or blog.
Learning Digital Marketing can help you in making exceptional strategies for viral marketing campaigns.
Creativity and preparation are the key points while designing the strategy for your viral content. One thing that you should escape from while implementing your viral strategy is that you should never become spammers nor go overboard while sharing the content. Instead, you should try finding the perfect place and time for your content and let the “viral fuse” light itself. Viral Marketing acts as a double-edged sword due to its ease in spreading and sharing.
