Viral Marketing 101: Is It Right for You?

Ever thought of why marketers are the champions in the field of sales?

The role of a marketer is to promote an organisation’s products and services. It is their job to come up with strategies that will increase sales and revenue while also aligning these strategies with the needs of the customers. Let’s look at a marketer’s purpose now that we know what he or she does.

A marketing strategy involves attracting potential clients or customers to your products and services. Marketing involves research, promotion, sales, and distribution of your products or services.

But do you know out of several types of marketing, one extraordinary marketing aspect or you would love to say, a technique has checked upon all the requirements of every organisation. Let’s tap into it!

Viral Marketing

The viral marketing technique involves organic or word-of-mouth advertising about a product or service spreading rapidly. Memes, shares, likes, and forwards have greatly increased as a result of the internet and social media.

Virality is sometimes triggered by marketing campaigns, but just what goes viral remains a mystery. A viral marketing campaign can help a business reach a wider audience and, ultimately, gain more customers.

Importance Of Viral Marketing

Although the practice was much more widespread in the early to mid-2000s as new internet businesses were created in extreme numbers, it is still prevalent among internet-based business-to-consumer companies.

Through the widespread adoption of social media networks, such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, modern viral marketing efforts have become more effective and efficient.

A viral marketing campaign can help you launch a new product by getting your brand in front of a large potential market quickly. Despite the fact that YouTube videos cost fractions of what TV commercials do, they can have a huge impact on brand recognition if they inspire people to share your message.

If it’s their first exposure to your product or service, a viral campaign isn’t the place to tell them every detail. As a result, it should generate a reaction quickly and easily, such as laughter, surprise or shock. Your biggest fans can help you spread the word if you already have a strong online presence. 

You shouldn’t just post your product’s viral marketing video on YouTube and hope for the best. Put ads linking to the video on search engines, with the ads appearing when users search for terms related to your product.

History Of Viral Marketing

Facebook advertisements or images reach thousands, if not millions of people and result in hundreds of comments, likes, and shares. After sharing the post with your friend, you share it with your family, and so on.

The roots of viral marketing can be traced back to 1996, when a small startup called Hotline needed a cheap way to promote its new email service, Hotmail. All Hotline emails include the line “Get your own free Hotmail at www.hotmail.com”

How did it turn out? Any ideas!

Over the course of a year, the number of Hotmail users increased from 20,000 to 1 million. 86 million active users were using Hotmail by 2001, which accounted for 30 percent of the email market. Using a service involuntarily promotes it, which is one of the most important aspects of viral marketing.

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The Psychology Behind Viral Marketing

In terms of content creation, only a few topics are of interest to people. In general, they are interested in things that evoke some sort of reaction from them. There are some groups that are drawn to the taboo, unusual, and secrets. The humorous, remarkable, and outrageous appeal to other groups as well! This is one of the reasons why people are so captivated by celebrity gossip.

Human beings like content that evokes an emotional response, which is part of the reason behind this. A person might be shocked, amazed, or disgusted, or it might be a combination of these things. Our common characteristic is that it’s different and unusual.

Elements Of A Successful Viral Marketing Campaign

When spreading your brand wings and going viral, you need to follow these principles:

Connect emotionally with the feelings

You need to connect with people emotionally in order for your viral campaign to be successful. It needs to strike people “in the feels” in order to get them to share it, whether it is compassion, bewilderment, ecstatic joy, a desire to have something, or FOMO.

Make it easy to share

Perhaps it’s through hashtags, perhaps it’s through images that can easily be manipulated and replicated, perhaps it’s by giving away something that people will see others have and want. An easy-to-share item won’t go viral if it can’t be shared.

Time yourself perfectly

Timing is everything when it comes to your campaign. Identify what’s working for other companies in your field and what your target audience is into right now to understand the zeitgeist you’re releasing your campaign into.

Platforms and methods should be used correctly

To stay relevant and reach their audience, all brands are on social media today. Nevertheless, not every brand is on every platform and not every platform is right for your viral campaign. To be successful with viral marketing, you must choose the right platform for your campaign – even if (ideally, when) it crosses over to other platforms.

It’s important to be unique

It takes a lot more work on your part to create your own viral campaign. The idea of replicating something that has already been done won’t work; you will fail. Rather, think about the marketing goals you want to achieve.

Types Of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing involves using existing social networks to increase brand, product or service awareness. To spread a marketing message, individuals rather than traditional campaigns are used. There are a number of reasons why it is a frequently used marketing strategy, including the ease of executing a campaign, good targeting and fast response rates.

Here are some types of viral marketing:

• This is the simplest and most crude form of viral marketing, as it encourages users to send messages to others. Basically, this strategy involves placing a message at the bottom of an email that prompts readers to forward it.
• Most organizations use incentive-based viral marketing in which they reward people for passing along messages or providing their addresses. Basically, it requires the user to take action in order to earn the reward.
• Gossip spreads across the globe like wildfire; it travels rapidly from one person to another. Develop a strategy that can create some controversy, making it hot gossip, and spreading it across the country.
• It consists of a viral message that appears as a cool or unusual page, activity, or piece of news, without any provocation to link to or share it. There doesn’t seem to be any marketing going on here. It is bypassing the message in a quiet way that the message is passed on – innocently to other people.
• Viral marketing involves inviting others to join communities organized by users. Users create and manage their own contact lists through a database provided by an online service provider. As a result, they create a self-propagating, viral chain of contacts that encourages others to join.

Finest Examples Of Viral Marketing Campaigns

For marketers, viral marketing seems like magic. Creating viral content is extremely unlikely, but it’s an organic, fast way to spread awareness of your brand, product, or service.

Dollar Shave Club: A Great Blade

In this viral marketing example, you can see that you don’t have to have a huge budget (the video cost $4,500) or a large brand following to create an effective video. You can also use humour and take a chance to achieve incredible results. 

Chicken Sandwich Insanity at Popeye’s

It is possible to re-generate excitement about a product. Popeye’s viral campaign is an excellent example of how to use viral campaigns for product launches.

Real Beauty Sketches from Dove

In viral video marketing, you should try to touch consumers’ emotions deeply. Generally, viral marketing thrives on emotions (such as joy, shock, and humour), but this video has a unique ability to touch people.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Viral Marketing

Companies can better market their products through viral marketing by reaching consumers they wouldn’t reach through traditional marketing campaigns. By expanding its reach, the company is able to enter new markets and potentially expand its customer base.

Traditional advertising campaigns cost a lot more than viral marketing. When consumers share their positive experiences with a company’s products and services with others, advertising is essentially free. But, let us now have a check on the pros and cons of Viral Marketing.

Pros of Viral Marketing

• Extreme reach
• Exponential growth
• Cost-effective

Cons of Viral Marketing

• Wrong word of mouth
• Hard to measure
• Virality is low

Tips for Creating a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign

In order for businesses to increase their chances of going viral, there are steps they can take in order to increase the likelihood of success. However, it is often a matter of catching lightning in a bottle.

• Prior to planning, you must determine who your target audience is. A viral piece of content that appeals to everyone is exceptionally difficult to create. The majority of campaigns tend to target particular groups and markets because of this. Identify your target audience and get to know them better.
• Research what attracts and repels them. Consider their needs, interests, and desires when creating content. Content that speaks to them on a personal level is more likely to be successful.
• You should, however, be cautious about the visuals you use. Visuals can convey many explicit and implicit meanings, and they can sometimes be interpreted in ways that are contrary to a brand’s intent or public image.
• You should be selective about the visuals and text you use, but you should also be bold. There is no such thing as bland or safe viral content. Viewers tend to have strong reactions to it. It is often difficult to get noticed in the increasingly crowded virtual landscape without the element of surprise. Sensationalism, however, isn’t always necessary.
• Identify the key takeaways your audience should get from the campaign. Particularly, you should consider what ideas it will convey about your brand. A brand can be shown as playful and irreverent by using comedy. It will portray the brand as humane and caring if it displays kindness and charity toward others.
• Content on the internet is disposable: it is consumed and immediately forgotten. Making a brand memorable requires a deeper message. As well as sparking people’s curiosity, it will pique their interest in learning more.
• It is ultimately up to the audience to take action in a viral campaign. Ideally, it will result in more people seeking out and engaging with the brand. In the end, the campaign is all about making money and gaining exposure.

Things To Learn

An inexpensive and effective way to increase awareness and promote a brand or product is through viral marketing. Often, companies rely on their audience or targeted users to spread the word about their advertising campaigns and positive experiences.  Growing a business, entering new markets, and increasing revenue can be achieved through successful campaigns. 

It is important for companies to choose the right platforms for advertising and format their content so that it can be easily shared. Unfavourable results can erode earnings and damage the reputation of a company if performed poorly.