Viral Marketing Initiatives

What is Viral Marketing? It may help to know exactly what it is to truly identify what it is that makes a marketing initiative go viral. According to an article from Investopedia (Viral Marketing, n.d.) “Viral marketing seeks to spread information about a product or service from person to person by word of mouth or sharing via the internet or email. The goal of viral marketing is to inspire individuals to share a marketing message with friends, family, and other individuals to create exponential growth in the number of its recipients.” As with anything I am sure there are many characteristics as to why a marketing initiative goes viral. In my opinion, the top five characteristics are unique content, share-ability or ease of sharing, creative, relevant, and plays on an emotion. Any marketing initiative viral or not should have most of these characteristics but what sets viral content apart, I think, is the share-ability part. Let’s investigate each characteristic a little bit more.

Unique/Good Content

It’s a no-brainer that good content will grab your audience’s attention and make them want to pass along the message. This is probably one of the most important characteristics, because without the content what do you have? An idea. According to Laurel Reese (2014), if you want people to share your content, make it share-worthy…your content needs to stand out if you want others to share it. Depending on what is being shared your content should either be long form if it’s an article that is being shared (i.e. news and research articles shared on Facebook), but most of the time if it is being shared across social media it should be scalable because most consumers don’t want to take the time to read long-form content. Make it short and simple or even better make it a video.

Share-ability

            The whole point of a viral marketing campaign is for it to be shared and disseminated among consumers. You want your audience to be able to share it from person to person whether that be through social media, e-card, email, etc. the medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: email, website, graphic, software download. As Dr. Ralph Wilson put it viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication is easy and inexpensive. The digital format makes copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Again, short is better (2018).  

Creative

I think this is another one of the most important characteristics a marketing initiative needs to become viral. Consumers are marketed to all day long, and to be effective you must push through the white noise. How do you do this? Create content or a marketing initiative that really catches the consumers attention, do something you’ve never done before. Andrew Mendez of Tipsy Social explains that “the most successful viral campaigns are created by thinking outside-of-the-box – either using creative formats like videos, slideshows, GIFs, etc. It’s not just about the format though. The content must be creative (2017.).” Statistics show that video content views have increased 99 percent on YouTube and 258 percent on Facebook between the last two years. These numbers back up the fact that video is more effective than words or images, videos can help you see what others are feeling and the internet and social media help you to transfer that feeling to others.

Relevant

Relevancy is another no-brainer, that factors into the first characteristic of good content. If a consumer doesn’t feel your marketing campaign is relevant to their life they click pass it or away from it and almost never return. So, it’s important that you not only make your content good content but you also make it relevant. I do have a counter argument to relevancy however, I think that if you pair good content with creativity you may be able to pull consumers that are not apart of your target audience in and convert them into loyal consumers, or at the least they may think that your marketing campaign was clever, relevant, or good enough to share with someone else they think it may be more relevant for. That is the really the beauty in word-of-mouth marketing, sometimes even if it doesn’t apply to someone specifically more than likely they know someone that it applies to.

Play on Emotion

            From a personal standpoint most of the content that I share on social media, give me either a warm and fuzzy feeling or makes me laugh until I am crying. For me sharing these posts is my way of sharing things that touch me or that I want to enlighten others with. Reese explains, “Research shows that viral content appeals to our emotions, particularly positive emotions like amusement, joy, hope, surprise, nostalgia, affection and excitement (2014).”

References

Staff, I. (2018, April 26). Viral Marketing. Retrieved July 1, 2018, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/viral-marketing.asp

Reese, L. (2014, October 09). Catching Content: Top 10 Attributes of Viral Marketing Campaigns. Retrieved July 1, 2018, from https://enveritasgroup.com/campfire/top-10-attributes-of-viral-marketing-campaigns/

Wilson, R. (2018, May 06). The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing. Retrieved July 1, 2018, from https://www.practicalecommerce.com/viral-principles

Why Video is Exploding on Social Media in 2018 – and How You Can Take Advantage. (n.d.). Retrieved July 1, 2018, from https://www.wyzowl.com/video-social-media-2018/

Mendez, A. (2017, December 05). Five Elements of Every Viral Marketing Campaign » Tipsy Social. Retrieved July 1, 2018, from https://getwithtipsy.com/viral-marketing-five-characteristics-successful-viral-campaign/