Do you want to go viral and get the word going about your business?
Totally understandable. 89% of B2B marketers say brand awareness is their most important goal.
Each passing day, a new piece of content goes viral for a number of reasons like planning, luck, and creativity. This viral piece can be a YouTube video, a trending hashtag, or a meme.
Getting viral offers tons of benefits. But, how do you do it? The answer is – Viral Marketing.
But viral marketing won’t happen overnight. You need to work on your content offerings and learn the whys and the hows of it.
This is exactly where this guide comes to your rescue! We’ll tell you some tips, tactics, and everything else you need to know about viral marketing.
So let’s get started!
What is Viral Marketing? (Definition)
Simply, viral marketing is an awareness technique that helps generate the interest of a large audience quickly. This type of marketing is heavily reliant on the audiences.
What does it mean to be viral? Well, viral marketing will put you onto most, if not all, social media feeds of people.
For example, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was one of the most viral campaigns ever started with one video and went onto generate over $115 million in donations for the ALS Association in eight weeks.
But viral marketing is a mixed blessing – if done right, you’ll reap incomparable benefits but if it runs out of control, it can shine a negative light on your business.
But let’s focus on the bright side – here are some reasons why you should definitely give viral marketing a try!
Advantages of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is not an easy task, but if done rightly, can help you garner buzz and great conversions for your brand. Here are some more benefits of viral marketing:
- Reach – When you go viral, you can easily spread awareness about your brand to a large audience. Viral marketing will help you reach new audiences in no time.
- Fast Growth – Although becoming successful overnight is super rare, viral marketing is one of the very few lucrative options that help you cause an explosion in a short period of time.
- Low Cost – In viral marketing, you won’t have to spend too much. Once you have good, resonating content, all you need is for the audience to do the rest, all for free! And thanks to this already existing audience that helped you go viral once, all your future campaigns are a sure-fire!
- Builds Credibility – Audiences sharing your content with their entire network will develop credibility towards your brand. Such newfound recognition will create trust and acceptance.
Like we already said, there is no guarantee for going viral but you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, so we’re giving you some tested strategies which have caught fire before.
Viral Marketing Techniques To Keep In Mind
There is no hard and fast rule in going viral. Viral Marketing just uses the best and most tested techniques that have seemed to work before to make content go viral. Here are some of them:
1. Influencer Campaigns
Simply, an influencer is someone with a huge social presence. You can find such influencers appropriate for your business and collaborate with them to reach out to new audiences.
89% say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. (Source)
Influencer campaigns are the perfect go-to for viral marketing as they are easily measurable and very effective.
How will this help make your content go viral? Well, unlike ads that stop running once you stop paying, an influencer will generate interest among his already, existing followers for your brand.
Multiply this by simultaneous influencer campaigns and the right content, you surely have a viral campaign on your hands!
Read more: 15 Clever Marketing Tactics You Need To Know!
2. Appeal Through Emotions
Emotions are key if you want to go viral.
Gillette’s ad “Perfect isn’t Pretty” was about various athletes that spoke about their personal and professional struggles and what made them resilient.
This theme of struggles and pain is something that hit right home for all the audiences.
This is backed with proof – Companies that provide an emotional connection with customers outperform the sales growth of their competitors by 85%.
It’s always the campaigns that make you laugh, or cry, or feel nostalgic that are successful. So make sure your campaign is driven by emotion and spurs your audiences to action.
3. Be Unpredictable
There are tonnes of content that is being shared on the internet right this minute. If you’re just another brand trying to be cool or tell how good your brand is, chances are you’ll get lost in the noise.
That is why – make your campaigns unpredictable and set them apart from the other brands. With this. you’ll easily catch the attention of the audience and increase your chances of going viral.
4. Offer Free Products
Giving away free trials or samples is a great way to generate buzz and earn trust.
Free services will attract more audiences, who will also share and recommend your product when they’re satisfied by its offerings.
It’s true you may not earn a profit right now, but indirectly you’re setting yourself up for a viral campaign that will generate huge ROI.
Viral marketing is all about the snowball effect that keeps increasing with momentum – giving away free products is your first step to rolling that snowball.
These freebies will capture eyeballs and these eyeballs will sooner or later turn into conversions.
Read more: Meme Marketing: Definition, Tips & Examples!
5. Simplify Brand Message
All viral marketing campaigns have one simple goal – redirecting people to your brand. So don’t use multiple CTAs in your ad because that may confuse your audiences.
Your message shouldn’t be cluttered. It should be a simple takeaway that is memorable and actionable.
This doesn’t mean that you should pull back on creativity, all you need to make sure is that the message is fairly simple and easily perceivable.
Dove’s 2006 Evolution video was all about self-love and redefining what it meant to be beautiful, and was thoroughly put across without them saying too much.
There is an abundance of viral marketing tools available online, and we’ve created a list of a selected few to help you grow your campaigns.
Viral Marketing Tools That Will Help Your Campaigns
1. Elink.io
Pricing: Paid plan starts at $12/month
Most of the best viral marketing is content-based. So you need to ace this part of your campaign with the right tool!
And elink.io is the perfect go-to for all your content needs! You can create and share intricately created website content, social bio links, newsletters, and so much more!
With over 50+ stunning templates, you’ll never have to worry about design ever again!
It also offers a browser extension to let you add content on the go. Whenever you find any content that you want to share, just click on elink’s extension and it’ll let you add it to your website.
And then there is content automation. Elink will do all the grunt work of automating content creation for your websites, newsletters, social media feeds, and more. All you have to do is choose sources and add filters in order to make your content more effective and relevant.
Anything that you create on elink can be shared as a stand-alone web page, embedded into any website, or sent as an interactive newsletter via Gmail, MailChimp, or almost any other email platform.
Read more: How does Content Curation help with Marketing?
2. Viral Loops
Pricing: $34/month
Viral loops is a robust template-based viral & referral marketing solution for marketers. They have a varied range of powerful templates to help you with your campaigns.
On Viral Loops, You can run milestone referral campaigns, e-commerce referral campaigns, refer-a-friend, and more campaigns within minutes with a complete overview of the performance.
3. Grow Surf
Pricing: $89/month
GrowSurf is a viral marketing tool for referrals that allows you to create unlimited campaigns, collect leads and create flexible rewards.
You can create viral contests, quizzes, refer-a-friend campaigns within a few clicks with their software. It also has amazing email integration, embedded forms, CTA buttons, and more that will make your viral marketing journey super easy and successful.
4. Gleam
Pricing: $97/month
Gleam is another popular viral marketing tool that works smoothly across many different platforms.
You can run giveaways, contests, sweepstakes, and more competitions that drive user engagement. You can easily connect Gleam to your Twitter, Youtube, and other social media handles.
With features like built-in viral sharing, one-click entry, smart email notifications, this is a great tool to create campaigns and keep track of them.
5. MobileMonkey
Pricing: $9/month
Mobile Monkey is the next generation of chat tools for Instagram, SMS, web chat and Facebook Messenger. It is super easy to set up and you can easily automate your processes.
The more people respond, the more awareness your brand will receive. You can automatically capture a lead as well as the user’s data every time you get a response to your private message.
MobileMonkey is also the only platform that allows marketers to make Facebook ad bots, SMS bots, and native webchat bots in one place.
Don’t Be Shy – Go Viral!
The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow – Bill Gates
By that means, going viral is like being the talk of the town.
Every day, some sort of content goes viral and catches the attention of millions of people.
There is no assurance in the game of going viral – it depends on your content, how well it resonates with the people, and undoubtedly, luck!
The techniques and tools mentioned above will help you in this planning. So try them out and increase your chances of taking the world of social media by storm.
Do let us know about your experience with viral marketing by tweeting us @elink_io, we’d love to hear from you!
Further reads:
Social Curation: What is it & How to Use it to Get More Leads!
Marketing Channels You Need to Use This Year!
How to Display RSS Feeds in your WordPress Website?
Marketing Psychology: 9 Strategies to attract Customers!
15 Must-Have Business Marketing Tools in 2021
Build Brand Awareness With These 9 Quick Yet Effective Ways
