How to Create Viral Content Marketing Campaigns to Grow Your Audience

How do you create viral content marketing campaigns for a business or industry? There’s no magic formula, but there are steps you can take to encourage more people to share your stories. What is Viral Content Marketing? Viral content marketing elicits social sharing through interesting stories, images or videos. These pieces of valuable content go beyond marketing speak and have an element of fun or interest that compels people to share them with their greater circle.

Viral content marketing campaigns are incredible if done correctly. They can help you start an avalanche by gaining thousands of new visitors and subscribers to your blog or product. However, as with any avalanche, if it’s not done correctly or with poor snow conditions, you could end up injured or worse — buried under the snow. But if things are executed correctly, and you have built the foundation for it up over time — oh boy! A viral marketing campaign is far more powerful than any other type of campaign you can run. This article will reveal to you how to create such a campaign.

What if I told you there was a way to get your content in front of millions of people and get them to engage? Being able to harness the power of viral content is an important step in advancing a brand’s visibility. Don’t worry; we’re not going to automatically tag all of your cats (yes, I know you have multiple cats). This post will help you understand the basics of creating a successful viral content marketing campaign.

Content marketing is a great way to grow your audience engagements. But what if you don’t know how to create valuable content that’s interesting enough to go viral? As long as people share your content because they find it interesting or helpful, you can build a valuable relationship with that person and the people they influence.

When content goes viral, it can generate tons of engagement, traffic, and marketing for your brand. If you want your well-written content to reach out to your targeted audiences, then viral marketing is the best option. Discover the power of viral campaigns and how you can build them. While there is no guarantee, these tips can help the likelihood of content going viral.

How to Reach People Who Have Turned off Their Marketing Radars

Every business needs to be doing more online marketing. But most don’t know how to create a viral campaign that will attract people who aren’t even paying attention. Viral content marketing is more difficult than ever. People trust their friends and families more than they trust brands. If you’ve ever seen a business with a big Instagram following struggle to get new people interested in their ad, it’s because of this trust gap. Celebrities can create an addictive meme. If people share something about their favourite celebrities on Instagram, they might become more inclined to go see them live. That’s the power of celebrity. But it takes work to attract those people to your brand.

Marketing is a science. It’s getting as much of an audience as possible to become interested in your brand. But the most important thing—at least for the bigger brands—is to learn how to make your product stand out on the Internet, on social networks like Facebook, and in the minds of potential consumers.

Creating a blog is not enough anymore. A finite audience will read any content on your blog. To improve your reach beyond your core audience, you must leverage your unique value proposition: your expertise.

Look at past Viral Content That Achieved Virality and Figure out Why It Became Popular

Have you ever thought of the benefits of creating viral content but felt like it’s beyond your capabilities? If you’re struggling with how to create viral content in your business, look at past viral content that achieved virality and figure out why it became popular. Viral content marketing campaigns are useful because they create a reaction among your target audience. They are emotional triggers that help build an audience and decrease the churn rate. To help create your own viral content marketing strategy and campaign, let’s see how they executed successful viral campaigns.

The Old Spice Man

Could we really talk about viral video marketing campaign examples without featuring the Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” video campaign?

I remember watching this commercial years ago when I was doing my master’s program. The Old Spice Man commercials appeared on TV, but they went viral on social media. Old Spice remains the king of viral marketing campaigns with its funny and outlandish ads.

With his ad, Old Spice man Isaiah Mustafa created a stir, appealing to the female audience while giving a subtle message to the male audience to buy Old Spice.

The campaign resulted in an increase in Twitter followers by over 1,000% and over 600,000 people on Facebook liked the ads! The videos have amassed over 100 million views.

Procter & Gamble did not offer any discounts or ask buyers to buy Old Spice, it just gave a suggestion and caught the attention of consumers through the ad. Buyers might buy the Old Spice body wash without consciously realising why they did so! The lesson is to be creative.

In their case, it’s clear that Old Spice knew their audience well. They tracked the success of that first video and leaned into its popularity by following the same roadmap and style of content that helped them go viral in the first place.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

This is one of the best marketing campaigns of all time. Basically, the challenge was to toss a bucket worth of ice and water on your head and challenge yourself to do the same within 24 hours.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge started in 2014, which was an online effort to raise awareness for people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis disease and to raise funds. The campaign became successful and viral with over 17 million people taking part in the challenge worldwide. The below video shows the Ice Bucket Challenge taken by Bill Gates:

The challenge became viral on social media platforms as well. Ice Bucket Challenge only asked participants to pour a bucket of ice-cold water and donate.

Doing something unique and unusual, which hasn’t been done before, can also lead to the popularity of your campaign just like Ice Bucket Challenge. Participants were asked to challenge a minimum of three persons to take the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Dove “Real Beauty Sketches” Campaign

In April 2013, Unilever, with its ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Brazil, came out with the Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign to empower women about how they look.

Rather than emphasizing Dove’s products, the campaign focused on the female perspective of her self-image, altering the way Dove is seen as a company.

Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign proves that marketing your company includes not only promoting your brand. This campaign went viral because it connected emotionally with the audience.

Involving customers in your campaign and providing them with a platform for discussion is an invaluable way to develop customer relationship.

The impact of the campaign was that while buying Dove’s products, people thought they are supporting a social cause.

Dove monitored the campaign in real-time, responded to conversations and optimised its activities for better engagement and market penetration, ensuring the right people saw the video.

What We Can Learn from These Viral Marketing Campaigns

From the above examples, we can see that viral content marketing campaigns have been around for years, but are becoming more and more widespread. When everyone is sharing the same content at once doing whatever it takes to get shares, the chances of having an impact seem greater. The goal of a viral content marketing campaign should not be to simply replicate an existing campaign but to understand why something got so popular. Know what people are sharing so that when the time comes to create your own viral content, you can use it as inspiration.

When people share something, whether it’s a funny video, photo or status update, they are automatically filling the social media space with more of that content. This creates an environment for future content creators to visit and learn more about other interesting things shared online. By resetting the parameters for what successful viral content marketing looks like, you can optimise your chances of creating this type of content.

A successful content marketing campaign relies on attracting blog writers, SEO experts, and regular bloggers to write about your subject. Viral marketing encourages people to share your content across their networks and thus improves overall exposure. The aim of viral content marketing is to transform a small footprint into a large one through incremental improvements in the number and frequency of shares. You want to figure out how to create content that will become popular before it reaches a critical mass and/or becomes too prevalent for its effectiveness to be questioned.

Create a Bunch of Mini-content Pieces

Content marketing has had a lot of success over the last few years as an effective way of increasing traffic, revenue and reach. However, it’s still fairly new to mass society, and some people might not know how to start or where to start with it.

Viral content marketing has been around for a while, but it’s still fairly new to the masses. There are a few different ways you can go about creating viral content. The first and easiest route is sending out mini-pieces of content. These can be videos, blog posts, or even high-quality images and eye-catching images. Each piece of content you create will attract new people to your website because they’ll think it must be a real genuine article. When people click on one of these pieces, they’ll be taken to your website, which increases the chance of them sharing it with their friends and possibly making you money from Google Ads.

Small, bite-sized content pieces are better than big, chunkier long-form content if you’re going to go viral. To get your long-form content ready for a potential viral spread, you may need to write one or two original pieces (about 200 words) that are carefully crafted and developed. These can be anything from funny parodies to sarcastic jokes, charts and graphics to infographics, photos, videos or short stories. They can also be about an issue that is important to your niche audience at that moment.

The simplest way to think about it is creating 50 unique pieces of viral content is more valuable than creating one engaging piece. Instead of creating a giant piece of content that you will only publish occasionally, think about how you can make something that is useful or entertaining someone once per day (or every day if you are famous). This way you can spread the word about your brand and build up an audience that you can keep engaged.

Identify the Most Emotionally Charged Visuals You Can Find

According to this article, 75% of posts shared on social media are images or feature copy with supporting images. In a study on emotions and virality, researchers examined how certain emotions encourage massive shares. They found that content goes viral when it elicits an emotional response that meets certain arousal levels and dominance, two dimensions used to categorise our emotions.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words, and a video is worth much more! Yes, visuals are the perfect candidates for today’s content marketing strategies. They create connections between the reader and your brand, which can lead to more effective SEO. A brilliant picture, image or video can set an idea in motion, it can be the spark that ignites an idea into something more, it connects the reader to your brand or product and gives them an instant emotional response that can turn them into advocates.

We can easily share viral content on platforms like Twitter and Facebook because it touches on something that most people feel passionate about – something that connects directly with their core.

The first thing you need to know about using visuals to make information viral is that it doesn’t have to be about horror pictures and gore. Humans are emotionally invested in stories, viral images, audio, video and even texts that depict events that touch them in the heart or brain. And for maximum emotional appeal, focus on stories that touch the human psyche, not just the news.

In today’s hyper-mediated marketplace, content must be more than just words. It’s the visual appeal that move hearts and minds, which is why it’s critical to understand how to craft your own viral content marketing campaign. Do it well and your audience will follow your lead. Do it poorly, and they won’t.

11 Tips on How to Create Viral Content Marketing Campaigns to Grow Your Audience

1. Know your target audience and what appeals to them.
2. Understand your audience’s emotions and create a strategy that emphasizes that.
3. Avoid using words that prompt negative emotions. Instead, use snappy trigger words like “easy” or “new” and pepper your content with exclamation points.
4. Avoid creating viral content around tragedies or negative events.
5. Focus on content creation that’s entertaining.
6. Promoting social experiences improve the overall response of customers.
7. Prompt your audience into taking your desired calls to action, causing them to share with their family and friends.
8. Persuade your audience to comment, create their own content, or otherwise play along with the goal of sharing your content with their own networks.
9. Make your audience feel understood because they will only share your content if they feel it is an authentic reflection of their emotion.
10. Leverage influencer marketing and avoid the scams by so-called social media influencers.
11. Let your data take the spotlight and keep the marketing jargon to a minimum.

Takeaway

Viral content usually strikes a nerve and gets passed around liberally. It’s easier than you think to create content that spreads like wildfire. Do you need help with creating a viral content marketing campaign to grow your audience? Contact us today or schedule a consultation session to get quick answers to your marketing questions.

Related Article(s)

• Why You Must Be Thinking about Content Marketing
• 12 Common Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid Immediately
• Reasons Why Video is Good for Your Content Marketing
• 9 Principles of Social Media Marketing – Infographic
• What Are the Types of Digital Marketing?
• Should You Post the Same Content to All Social Networks?

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