Easy Ways to Create Viral Marketing Campaigns
What every marketer aims to achieve with their marketing campaigns is to go viral. It is their hope that their marketing campaigns will become very popular and will be widely accepted. Viral marketing indeed makes the job of the marketer easier as it involves other people helping you share your campaigns and spread your brand message. It might sound simple, but this isn’t an easy task to accomplish. People just love your marketing campaigns and feel inspired enough to share them.
Viral marketing involves the creation of market pieces or buzzwords that grabs people’s attention are can get stuck in people’s memories. It will include the use of social media, videos, one-to-one communication, and text messaging, etc. to pass across information about a brand, product or service, instead of using commercial adverts. In viral marketing, people will market your product or brand for you without knowing themselves. In the world, we are in and the different available platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, etc., it is easier for video contents, images, and articles to go viral and be seen by millions of people in just a few minutes. All that needs to happen is for people to share it.
How to Create Viral Marketing Campaigns
1. Have a target audience
“Before you start to plan on what your marketing campaigns should look like, you must first of all settle on who your target audience is” – says Jake Gardener, marketing expert and essay writer at dissertation writing services.
To clear, you can’t create the kind of viral content that everybody likes. That’s why your content has to be targeted, so you know those groups of people to focus your marketing campaign on.
It’s not enough to just have a target audience, you should research them. This will enable you to know them better. You need to get information about what they like and what they don’t. What are their interests? What are they attracted to? These are common questions you should ask. Once you find these out, you’re better equipped to build your marketing campaign to appeal to them, said John O. from assignment help.
2. Be clear about your objectives
Yet again, before you start to create your content, you need to have clearly set and well-understood objectives. Except you don’t intend to create viral marketing campaigns, you don’t rush into things. You need to have a goal, an objective, and you need to plan in line with that.
One of the questions you must be able to answer before you start to create your content is “what do I want to achieve with this viral campaign?”
There should be no doubt in your mind when answering this question, otherwise, you need to sit back and think again. There are campaigns aimed at improving the awareness of a brand, while there are others aimed at selling or advertising a product or service. Knowing what your objectives are will guide your campaign.
3. Create visually-oriented content
Most marketing campaigns that go viral tend to be visually oriented campaigns. The reason is visual contents are easier to process and understand, and people are more inclined to share. Videos and images are generally more catchy and interest people more than long texts. Studies already show that the attention span of the new generation and millennials is just 8 seconds. So it’s important that you maximize that with image or video content, rather than texts.
However, you should pay attention to the image or video you’re putting out. You must make sure that they are easily understood, so as not to be misunderstood. Images, especially, can carry a lot of contrasting meanings depending on who’s viewing it. So, you must make sure your images are not misinterpreted to hurt the brand’s image.
4. Stir up emotions in your audience
If your marketing campaign is ever going to be viral, it is extremely important that you are able to stir up the emotions of your audience. Emotions are the main reasons for people sharing viral content across different social media platforms. If it doesn’t appeal to them or incite any kind of emotions in them, they have no reason to share it.
As the campaign creator, you have to choose what emotions you want the audience to feel when they see your content, then create the content to maximize this emotion. You should know that, although positive emotions are very commonplace and are more popular, the emotions that yield more results are negative emotions.
5. Be provocative
Although you should be picky about the visual viral campaign campaigns that you choose to run, you should be bold and not try to play safe. Viral contents are usually not safe or bland. If you want your content to stir emotions or provoke reactions from the viewer, you should provoke it.
You must make sure that your content has that element of surprise and is also sensational. You also would not want to overblow your campaign so that your audience is not left disappointed. This will hinder the campaign from going viral.
6. Pass your message across
Every marketing campaign should seek to pass a message across to its audience. The questions to ask are: what ideas will this campaign pass across about the brand? What message will the audience take from this campaign? Once you answer these, then you can create befitting content along that line.
If you want your brand to be viewed as caring and humane, your campaign should show generosity and kindness. You can use comedy if you want your brand to be viewed as irreverent and playful.
What matters is that you have a message that you are passing across and you aren’t creating disposable content that people tend to forget immediately after viewing it.
7. Pay more attention to visibility
Since the goal of creating a marketing campaign is for it to become viral, then you should be paying a lot of attention to the visibility of your campaign. A campaign that people can’t find easily is less likely to go viral than a campaign that’s on platforms where they can be seen frequently.
To ensure the visibility of your campaign, you must put your content out on the platforms that are appropriate for it. For instance, if you create video content, it is more appropriate on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. But if the content is an image, platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit are appropriate. Video content can also go viral on these platforms as well.
8. Use a CTA
There’s no point in creating a viral marketing campaign if there’s no prompt for the audience to carry out certain actions. Your viral content should increase brand awareness and visibility and make more people out and engage with you. Remember that the essence of the marketing campaign is to maximize profit and gain exposure.
So, you have to determine the action that you want your audience to take after they see your viral content and use a corresponding Call to Action (CTA). “If you need their participation in an event or your aim is for them to order a product or book for a service, get them to do what you want by using a CTA.” – says Jake Gardener, marketing expert at Dissertation Today.
9. Make it simple
Simplicity is important for viral content. Your viral content shouldn’t be overly complicated. Don’t overload it with information that will lose the audience. Whether you’re adding text to an image or you’re creating a video. It’s best that you keep it simple and short. Otherwise, there’s a tendency for the viewer to see it as something requiring a lot of their time and they’ll pass it. Remember that the average attention span of millennials is just 8 seconds. So, keep it short and simple. You have other competitors creating their campaigns as well, so, just ensure that you have the biggest impression in the shortest time possible.
10. Try not to push too hard
For content to be viral, it has to appeal to people’s emotions enough for them to share it. And the nature of social media is such that it’s impossible to predict what will or will not become viral. A concept might be viral today and tomorrow no one is viewing it while something very trivial may become the internet sensation. This unpredictability has made many marketers try to force their campaigns into being viral. The truth is you can’t force it. You have to let it grow naturally and organically. Using the strategies in this article will help you a lot. But if it doesn’t work, you have to try again. Maybe with a different approach this time. The fact is, there’s a bit of luck needed for content to go viral.
