What You Need To Know About Viral Marketing

Viral marketing buzz occurs daily in normal unspectacular circumstances and when you least anticipate it. Even most campaigns are not created with the intention to go viral.

The concept of viral marketing has taken hold and is being used by many companies throughout the world.  Cadbury, Old Spice, Evian, Volvo Trucks and many more have received millions of views and shares for their viral campaigns.

What is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing is all about creating a buzz for your marketing pieces or content that is attention grabbing and memorable in our modern, always connected world.

When something goes viral, it spreads extensively and rapidly from one person to another. With social media platforms, sharing content with thousands even millions of people happens in minutes.

Benefits of Viral marketing:

In simple words, it is the process of people doing marketing for you without even realizing it. Viral marketing is exactly what it sounds like, marketing that spreads like a virus. It helps in getting tremendous exposure, visibility, and better traffic, conclusively getting you increased sales revenue. Here are some major benefits of doing it:

• It is considered as a cost-efficient way of advertising.
• Viral marketing helps in enhancing your customer list.
• It helps in creating better visibility of your brand.
• It works as a faster mode of reaching the customer.
• Customizing the message based on user preference and local interest is also possible in viral marketing through data mining techniques.

Top Viral Marketing Techniques:

There are several techniques that will help you as a marketer to drive more traffic and sales.  These techniques don’t require lots of time, don’t involve spending enormous amounts of money and they absolutely do not rely on luck. Here are the top viral marketing techniques:

• Nothing goes viral on its own, you need to send the right message to the right people. For the desired result you must target the appropriate channel and audience.
• Want people to notice your content?? Then, you need to do something unpredictable – something different. People won’t bother to have a look if they know someone has done it before.
• Viral marketing is 100% about emotions. To create an impact with your marketing campaign on your target audience, your content must have an element of humor, shock, sympathy, surprise, bewilderment, curiosity or astonishment.
• Want to make your content go viral, then make it easy to share, download or embed. You need to allow people to share your content or message to get your campaign viral.
• A one-time viral message can quickly be forgotten. Having a series of viral messages will strengthen the effectiveness of your campaign.

Viral campaigns are mostly inexpensive, simple and most often taken on mobile phones or cameras and uploaded.  Fun, humor and excitement are all good if there is an underlying brand message to convey. Otherwise, people will see the humor, surprise element or sensational stuff in it and share it. However, it will not add value to the brand.