The most critical step in viral marketing is to create exciting and engaging content that appeals to a broad audience. The premise of viral marketing is simple: you want to get people talking about you, but for people to talk about you, you have to give them something innovative to talk about.
Choosing the right viral marketing strategies is secondary to creating a spectacular product or campaign. Keeping that in mind, it is important to save viral marketing efforts for campaigns that really have the potential to appeal to the larger audience in an authentic and shareable way.
A good viral marketer understands that in order for a campaign to reach a broad audience, it first must be widely circulated amongst a small, more dedicated and engaged audience. Eventually, this small scale virality will grow to reach the general public through likes, shares, retweets and perhaps even media coverage. Just as you would with any marketing campaign, it is important to identify your target audience and grow interest. This small group of engaged audiences will be critical to your overall success in going viral.
As we already learned, engaging content is an important component of any viral marketing campaign. Recent studies have shown that video content typically outperforms other content on social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram. To create a viral buzz for your campaign, video content is considered to be the best option. This is especially true in 2020 with the dramatic rise in popularity of the video sharing platform TikTok.
The general premise of virality marketing is based on the idea of mass viewership and engagement. To ensure your content is widely viewed and shared, it is important to remove barriers to your viewers. In order to encourage your content to go viral, we recommend removing any paywalls or secondary redirect links, in addition to enabling sharing, downloading and embedding your content on other sites. For the purpose of viral marketing, mass viewership should be prioritized before any type of exclusivity. In order for your content to go viral, you need to let go of the content and let it be shared and repurposed widely, often outside of your control.