Events — 01 Aug 2022
Guide to Viral Content Markting
The world has gone digital, and digital marketing has only helped improve brand awareness over the years.
The majority of the world’s population consumes content online. Marketers are trying to find new ways to reach their customers and audience through social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Viral content marketing is a great way to get your content seen by billions of people without paying extreme amounts for advertising, while still generating engaging advertisements.
Almost everybody has a mobile phone or some technological device that connects them to the rest of the world. Use this as an advantage in your social media marketing campaign, and even gain content ideas from observing what other brands do.
Viral content is a form of content that spreads rapidly across the web, usually through social media channels, it’s also known as “word-of-mouth advertising”.
Viral content marketing is a form of online advertising that uses viral techniques to get your brand noticed by as many people, as fast as possible, through various content channels. This can be done through the use of videos, images, or other creative forms of content.
This type of marketing aims to create something so good that it just has to go viral and appear on your audience’s social feeds. Once you have created viral content, you want to ensure that it reaches as many people as possible, and gains enough interest to become an exploding topic.
The best way to do this is by using a combination of affordable paid ads and organic posts.
Paid ads are great for getting your message out there quickly and effectively and targeting all the right marketing channels.
On the other hand, organic posts are free and will stay up on social media sites indefinitely. You just need to ensure that your content is engaging enough to keep users coming back.
The key to creating viral content is to think about what kind of content would interest your target audience. If you know who you are trying to reach, you should be able to come up with ideas that appeal to them.
Viral content marketing creates a buzz around your content that gets your target audience interested. When someone sees an image or video that appeals to them, they’re likely to share it with others. Viral videos, in particular, can be incredibly popular and easily shareable.
In turn, these people might share it with their followers, leading to more exposure.
Visual content is important. You can have posts with a certain amount of text in them, but your social media posts should always capture a viewer’s attention with creative design elements like motion graphics or eye-catching backgrounds. And don’t forget the power of hashtags.
This process continues until your content goes viral and becomes shareable with a wider or new audience.
This helps you generate more leads and sales, and your conversion rate will increase. When potential customers see your great content, they may become interested in your product or service, you develop a customer relationship, and your content spreads even further.
Viral campaigns should elicit an emotional response and should be one of your top content marketing goals. The customer journey and customer experience are what people will remember. Engaging advertisements and original content are what viral campaigns are made of.
There is a degree of SEO knowledge that is needed that can only assist you further with achieving virality. Understanding the algorithm of different social platforms allows you to tap into as many options as possible to have your content reach your audience on a global level.
The more people you have talking about your product or brand, the more likely you are to gain trust from a wider audience as well as recognition.
When you start generating positive word-of-mouth, you’re building credibility. People will begin to associate your name with quality products or services.
When you build credibility, you increase the likelihood that your business will succeed over time. The type of content you produce can also impact the credibility of your brand.
Consistent content marketing efforts that incorporate evergreen content leave your target audience satisfied, knowing that you put effort into campaigns and know what your audience likes and wants to see more of.
Providing your audience with original content is important in gaining credibility for your brand. There are many viral marketing trends out there that are successful on social media, you can still make use of such trends, just try approaching them from a new viewpoint.
An effective online content marketing strategy can maintain its viral status when the right content marketing tactics are used.
Your brand can extend its reach much further with viral content online marketing. By posting your content on different websites, you can potentially connect with people from all over the globe.
You can write blog posts that help people understand how your company works if you have a blog. Then, you can link those articles to your website where you sell your products or services to gain increased web traffic.
This allows you to expand your customer base without having to spend large sums of money on traditional advertising methods and showcase your quality content.
In addition to helping you grow your business, viral content marketing also helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field. As you continue to publish high-quality pieces of content, you will attract followers and loyal fans.
These people worldwide will look to you for advice and guidance as they work towards achieving their own goals.
Another marketing technique for creating content that can be accepted on a global scale is providing content that deals with global topics that are relevant to anybody, anywhere.
For example, a brand like Adidas might be focusing on athletic gear for an English soccer team, but that does not mean that the gear cannot be useful to other athletes in other parts of the world. A marketing team that recognizes the need for inclusion in viral content makes for a happy customer and, crucially, a loyal customer, too.
Compared to its competitor strategies, viral content marketing is one of the least expensive to run, with no need for large advertising campaigns.
Instead of spending thousands of dollars on TV commercials, radio spots, billboards, and more, you only need to pay for web hosting costs and the cost of producing your content.
As long as you create something that people want to share, you won’t have to worry about running out of funds. This, however, does take practice.
It’s always a good idea to start off with the lowest costs possible. Try creating a piece of content that does not require extensive resources. Observe how this social content performs and the emotional response it receives, and evaluate where you can add or remove certain elements.
It is trial and error, but once you have a content creation process that works, you are well on your way to creating successful campaigns.
Many factors determine how much you will spend on viral content marketing. The most important factor is how much effort you put into creating your content.
For example, if you plan on hiring professional photographers to take photos of your products, you will probably spend a little more money. However, if you simply use copyright-free images off the internet or try to design your own, you won’t need to spend very much.
Some marketing strategies can take time to develop and receive the leads and content metrics you need. Viral content marketing can assist with faster lead generation.
Once you post your content online, you can expect up to 50% of your target market to visit your site within 24 hours. You can then follow up with them by sending emails with a creative email newsletter or making phone calls.
Social media platforms allow users to easily share information with others who may be interested in what they’re reading. User-generated content is an important piece of the puzzle as well.
You cannot have content virality without your users contributing to your content’s sharing and even development. Customer reviews are a popular way to generate content that will appeal directly to your target audience.
You don’t have to wait weeks or months to see results. With viral content marketing, you can get started right away.
A lot of businesses struggle when trying to convert traffic into leads. In fact, some companies even lose money due to low conversion rates.
However, this problem is not so apparent with viral content marketing. Since your audience is likely to share your content, they are likely already going to buy from you.
Keeping track of your content marketing metrics is still important. You need to identify any drawbacks that may hinder your content strategy.
Here are some great viral content marketing case studies that were done right, and which suggest the rewards you can reap from an effective content marketing strategy.
There are many campaigns out there that have been successful, these three offer a glimpse into the realm of possibility within viral marketing campaigns, and having loyal customers.
After one month of its release, Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” gained an audience of more than 114 million views, yikes!
The content virality only continued to grow with this campaign. With so many women feeling insecure about their body image, this campaign brought an emotional connection into the works and gave more women the confidence to be themselves.
The “Real Beauty Sketches” was a short film that commissioned an FBI sketch artist to draw women based on their own perception of themselves and a stranger’s perception of them.
The video’s message about self-esteem connected with a massive audience and reached its target audience on a large emotional level.
The campaign aimed to generate feelings of “warmth”, “knowledge”, and “happiness”. Dove even partnered up with YouTube to share the viral video across a larger platform and social media channel.
The content marketing efforts paid off; this video has been viewed around 180 million times and the social shares skyrocketed.
This is a great example of the importance of emotion in content. Your audience wants to see the facts and figures about your product, sure, but they also want to connect with it and find a reason for why they should have it in their lives.
As most of us know, Oreo’s catchy tagline: “Twist. Lick. Dunk” has been around for decades. Many thought that people might be losing interest in this tagline, so Oreo did something fantastic.
One of the best viral content marketing campaigns of all time arose from a single tweet. Oreo tweeted: “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark” during the 2013 Superbowl massive power outage, which left fans confused and quite literally left in the dark.
This tweet gained fast and massive momentum from their audiences. Many began searching through social media trying to find out what may have happened, and stumbled across the iconic image of an oreo and a glass of milk against a dark background, with the words “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark”.
Oreo knew many would turn to their cell phones at this time, and decided to capitalize on this opportunity with a simple and smart idea, the retweets reached millions across the globe.
This also shows the powerful effects of social media marketing, as people use social platforms for nearly everything and anything.
Zoom saw an opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 and decided to create a successful and viral content marketing strategy that would pique the interest of their users.
As we all know, Zoom is a video conferencing platform, so the marketing team decided to come up with a virtual background challenge that would go on to captivate and motivate users worldwide, and gain its viral status.
It was a monthly competition where remote workers could share videos and images using Zoom’s handy background feature. At the end of every month, prizes would be awarded for the most creative and out-of-the-box background design.
This campaign is a good example of emotional connection as well.
The beginning of the pandemic was a depressing and stressful time. Zoom decided to allow its users to bring some fun to their lives, by partaking in this positive experience.
This campaign became the most successful viral content marketing campaign on social media in 2020.
Viral content marketing is here to stay. It will continue to grow and evolve as new platforms and content marketing tools emerge.
In the next few years, we can expect to see some exciting developments in this space. For instance, several companies are coming out with apps that allow users to easily upload and share videos directly to their favorite social networks.
There are also several other ways marketers can leverage the power of virality. One way is by creating content that allows consumers to share it with others.
Another way is by giving away free products or services in exchange for likes or shares.
There are also a lot of opportunities within the world of influencer marketing. Influencers have an incredible amount of impact on their followers.
If you give influencers enough exposure, they can help drive engagement and sales for your brand or small business and help you achieve your business goals.
The opportunities are endless with viral content marketing and ideas for viral campaigns are only going to become more creative and successful. Keep an eye out for viral campaigns and research the process that helped them to succeed with their content virality.
Written by
This article was written by Sam Hops. She is a content writer for MarketSplash - a digital magazine that covers design, eCommerce, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship-related topics. Sam is passionate about all this digital marketing but has a particular interest in graphic design and social media.
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