These techniques don’t require lots of time, don’t involve with spending large amounts of money and they absolutely do not rely on luck.
If you do not use online viral marketing techniques or not familiar with them at all, then you are putting your own business at a disadvantage by missing out on millions of potential visitors to your website or blog.
Before explaining the viral marketing techniques, let me describe what the Viral Marketing is all about.
What is Viral Marketing?
We have all heard the phrase “It went viral”.
But, what does that mean?
Viral Marketing is a method of creating buzzwords or marketing pieces that are attention-grabbing and memorable in our modern, always-connected world.
This method of marketing utilizes social media, text messaging, videos, and other person-to-person methods to spread information about an article, product or service instead of just creating a commercial advertisement and putting on radio or TV.
Viral marketing simply is the process of letting other people do your marketing for you without them even realizing it.
1. Target the appropriate audience and channels
The very first step to develop a viral marketing campaign is to find out who your targeted audience are and where your target audience lives online.
Nothing goes viral on its own, you need to send the right message to the right people. Your message needs to create the interest, if you want them to share with others.
The channel is equally important as because if you are marketing in a wrong channel then you won’t be able to reach your targeted audience. If you are unable to reach the targeted audience then you won’t be able grow the interest.
Let me give you a specific example here-
If your targeted audience is single, middle-class women, aged 18-24 then it might be a good idea to incorporate Pinterest into your marketing channel to go viral as it is a marketing network where 80% of active users are young women.
2. Create videos
Another excellent way to go viral is by making a video. A video can make your viewers engage in your product and experience.
Upload your video to Easy Web Video, then you can share that video with your friends. If they find it interesting and useful they will share it as well.
Eventually, the video becomes popular, it can end up spreading all over the internet.
Moreover, if your video is really interesting then people will embed your video on their websites or blogs.
A good rule of thumb for making a video viral is the more funny your video is, the more likely it is to go viral.
3. Offer a product or service for free
“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary.
Most viral marketing programs offer valuable product or service for free to attract attention.
By giving away something valuable you may not profit today or tomorrow but if you can generate enough interest then you will profit.
Free gets you eyeballs. Those eyeballs then see the other products/services that you are selling and that they’re looking for!
Eyeballs bring sales opportunities, valuable email addresses and advertising revenue.
So give a little to get a lot.
4. Create emotional appeal
Viral marketing can’t make much of an impact unless it has got an emotional appeal. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.
That’s why this is the most effective technique among all viral marketing techniques.
Now the question is how you can create a very strong emotion?
Here are some of the points you have to follow to create emotion.
- Create something which is filled with love or hate
- Either be an idiot or a genius
- Create something that will strike a chord, even if it’s contentious chord
5. Be unpredictable
If you want people to notice your marketing campaign, you need to do something unpredicted – something different.
People won’t bother to have a look if they know someone has done it before. People always want to see or learn new things.
Forget about trying to look cool – everyone does that.
Forget about trying to promote your product/service as just being great – others are doing that too.
Let me give you an example here, an unpredicted advertisement is one the most effective viral advertisements.
A bear being attacked by a man. Was it expected?
No, Not at all!
6. Enable sharing, embedding and downloading
If your video or content is easy to share, download or embed then it will be. That means you need allow people to:
- share your content or message easily
- allow people to easily embed it on their own sites
- download the content
Moreover, from a marketing standpoint, you should simplify your message so that people can easily understand it, which will encourage people to share with others. Everything you do to make that easier is going to improve your campaign.
7. Don’t Focus On Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is all about promoting your product or service, giving insights on how good is it, how it will help your customers and possibly using movie stars or supermodels (see “Smaht Pahk” above).
But do you think people care about you or your product?
No, not at all!
People engage more with interesting narrative.
When Sony made their Bravia TV advertisement, the product was not in the advertisement but everyone remembered it.
Focus on the narrative, not on you, your product or service and your company.
9. Social Outreach
Social outreach is another effective viral marketing technique. It’s easier for you to reach more people when influential individuals in your industry are recommending your product or service, or putting your content in front of your target people.
Reach out to influencers in your industry and ask if they will be interested to give a try your product or service, or to see your content but don’t directly ask them to share your content, as they’ll normally spread it if they find it useful for their followers.
The important thing is to offer a very unique content that can genuinely benefit their followers/readers, and leverage that aspect to get them to share your content.
Reinforcement
A one-time viral message can quickly be forgotten.
People just have seen your campaign. They think it was interesting, unpredictable, emotionally charged – you grabbed their complete attention.
Now what will you do?
You need to act. One of the easiest ways of doing that is to give them more.
Think about Progressive insurance and their long running ad with Flo.
People may not have required insurance when they first saw the ad. But, after seeing few versions of the same message, people will remember the name Progressive when they need insurance.
Therefore, having a series of viral messages will strengthen the effectiveness of your campaign.
To recap, viral marketing techniques are always changing as they have everything to do with trends.
By implementing the above 9 proven viral marketing techniques you can make your marketing campaign or content viral.
