Create Impact with a Viral Marketing Campaign
Viral marketing is all about dramatically boosting outreach by making lots of people pump our content in all directions across many channels at the fastest rate possible. That is why it is called viral, because viral content spreads much like a computer virus, this time intentionally.
Earlier we have discussed how viral marketing is not magical, that people do not share content virally only on the merits of good content, and that a successfully run viral marketing campaign heavily depends on the actions put forward by the people involved, whether they knew that they were sharing content to make it viral or not.
Viral Website
While it is true that much of what has become viral since the term “viral” began, there is a very relevant aspect of said content that people tend to forget about: where the content is housed.
That is, any website can potentially go viral if the content on it allows for it, but when this happens it is actually a matter of luck and unintentional. In the early days of the internet, viral content needed a viral website to be strikingly unusual. Nowadays, a viral website just needs to be responsive, be search engine friendly and host trending, high quality content.
Viral Content
Regarding trending and high quality content previously mentioned, your website will be next to nothing without content. Not just any type of content, mind you, but content with the highest possibility of going viral. Content that will not only make people want to share it with their friends, but content that they feel needs to be shared with the whole world if possible!
Viral content needs to be understood as content that not only targets a niche audience, but that caters to a large number of people from different subcultures. An example of non-viral content would be if you have food recipes, because food recipes will only be of interest to food minded people.
It can, of course, go kind of viral within a certain audience, but its outreach will not go further than that. An example of viral content is celebrity gossip, because celebrities inundate almost every aspect of popular culture, and word about something that a celebrity did will undoubtedly land on the news feed of anyone with a social network account.
Viral content can also be miscellaneous stuff that is so out of the norm that it deserves to be shared, like new tech products, scientific discoveries and news pieces.
To summarize, Viral content needs to meet the following criteria:
- It needs to touch an emotional chord within people, be it joy or sadness
- It needs to drive intense curiosity
- And It needs to be about something recognizable
Top 3 Viral Marketing Tools :
What’s Trending?
“What’s trending” is a home for all of what is trending on the Internet on any given day. You can visit this site to learn what is trending now, and what is worth featuring on your viral website to keep your visitors in the know while generating more high quality traffic. “What’s trending” covers the most viral and shareable content across the world wide web!
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a platform that is perfect for analyzing what kind of content performs best for any topic or competitor. What it basically means is that by using it, you’ll be able to define which topics are related to your business that are getting the most attention. Buzzsumo offers a visually simple, yet powerful interface that you can use to quickly identify the content that is working within a given niche or audience. By simply introducing a keyword or set of keywords, you’ll be able to see which social platforms like your search terms and the number of times they have been shared within a certain period of time.
Tout
Tout is a tool that focuses on video sharing, currently powering video content on over 2,800 websites, with an audience of over 46 million unique viewers monthly, helping publishers, content creators and advertisers generate revenue through its sophisticated technology.
Social Media
Social media is, without a shadow of doubt, a giant force behind making something go viral. This is because social media makes it really easy for content to spread at a really fast rate among different groups of people, with each group reaching out to other groups of people until a piece of viral content is all over the place!
Any marketer can leverage social media to spread content like there’s no tomorrow thanks to the very nature of the ways in which social media channels work and the options made available to them.
For starters, once you get a piece of content out there and it reaches people with high social networking potential, these highly social individuals put it out for their contacts to share. Then, your content becomes an unstoppable tidal wave that it’s not easy to contain! In a matter of mere hours your content will easily become a worldwide sensation!
On the other hand, most social networks give you paid advertising options that you can use to give a little boost to your viral marketing campaign or to outright promote it in an aggressive manner. No matter your approach, if your content is high quality and qualifies as viral, social media will take it out there, guaranteed.
The clearest examples of social networks putting viral content on the map are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, of course will help a great deal because it is the most popular social network on the planet, and Twitter works for viral content thanks to the fast-paced way in which content is shared across the network.