We’re all well aware of the fact that marketing is shifting from a landscape where marketers can utilize mass media to speakat consumers, to one where marketers are simply part of the crowd themselves. The bullhorn of radio, television, print and other one-way interruptive marketing approaches are quickly losing efficacy. So how do you get your brand noticed?
A recent article by Mitch Joel argues that brands must publish more content, that the old standbys of frequency and repetition that worked so well in decades past are still worthwhile today. Truth be told, he’s right. Publishing more content, even if the content isn’t viral or noteworthy, can be a great way to maintain or even grow existing large audiences.
But what if your brand or company doesn’t have an active audience of avid content consumers already? In this case, piles of mediocre content certainly won’t do the trick. If you don’t already have a large built-in audience, you must attract them from elsewhere. Viral marketing is hands-down one of the best ways to do this.
What Can Viral Marketing Actually Do?
Break through the noise
With 5.3 trillion display ads shown online each year, 400 million tweets sent daily, 144,000 hours of YouTube video uploaded daily, and 4.75 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every day, posting a few blasé blogs on the corporate website just isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to need something that cuts through the clutter.
Create massive brand exposure and free press
Successful viral campaigns regularly produce 1 million+ impressions, with standouts garnering 10x to 100x that number, often crossing over into the mainstream, and picking up free exposure on television and radio and in print media. For instance, in 2012, the viral campaign “Kony 2012″ for the Invisible Children organization garnered nearly 100,000,000 views, and was covered by most mainstream news organizations. The campaign has more than 2,000 results in Google News.
Generate high levels of social engagement, sharing, and brand interaction, which can lead to sharp increases in digital brand advocacy.
When Dove’s Real Beauty sketches campaign went viral, it garnered nearly 30 million views in ten days. Additionally, it single-handedly added more than 15,000 YouTube subscribers to Dove’s channel over the following two months, not to mention substantial increases in followers on Twitter and Facebook as well.
Massively improve organic search rankings
In our own experience at Frac.tl, two successful viral campaigns (Dying to Be Barbie and Before & After Drugs: The Horrors of Methamphetamine) were responsible for very sharp increases in organic search traffic to our client’s site. Viral content contributes significantly to primary signals Google uses as part of its ranking algorithm (authoritative links and social engagement).
This graph of the six-month ranking improvements for our client, Rehabs.com, reflects a 750% increase in site visits as a direct result of these viral campaigns. The hump at the beginning occurred at the launch of the first viral campaign which looked at the before and after images of individuals addicted to methamphetamine, with subsequent campaigns like “Is a Barbie Body Possible,” resulting in the sustained increase.
Increase brand engagement
When users engage with brands via content they choose, rather than content they’re given, they are more engaged with the content and the brand.
How Any Business Can Create Successful Viral Content Marketing Campaigns
Lesson 1: Create a Viral Coefficient > 1
Breaking through the noise and going viral is the direct result having a viral coefficient above 1. For the sake of simplicity, viral coefficient can be thought of as the total number of new viewers generated by one existing viewer. A viral coefficient above 1 means the content has viral growth and is growing, and a coefficient below 1 means that sharing growth is diminishing.
So how do you create content that people will share?
Step 1: Write a compelling title
Your title is what attracts new viewers. The more people you can get to consume your content, the more chances you have for getting people to share it. If you can’t get the initial click, your content is dead in the water.
Step 2: Use strong emotional drivers to make people care and share
As Thales Texeira noted, it is important to create maximal emotional excitement quickly. Hit them hard and fast with strong emotions, but remember to keep the branding to a minimum. Heavy use of branding can cause many viewers to disregard the content as spammy or salesy, resulting in loss of interest, abandonment, or even backlash.
When your content is in video form, be sure to give people an emotional roller coaster. This should be done by “pulsing” the emotionally heavy hitting points in your content with breaks or gaps. It is helpful to think of it as “cleansing of the emotional palate.” By creating contrast between the high levels of emotionality and areas of less emotional activation, the audience won’t find themselves becoming bored, satiated, or overwhelmed with too much of the same.
Step 3: Create content the strikes the correct emotional chords
While there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that strong emotions are key to viral sharing, there are a scarce few that indicate which emotions work best.
To this end, one of the best ways we’ve found to understand the emotional drivers of viral content is to map the emotions activated by some of the Internet’s most viral content.
In order to understand the best emotional drivers to use in the content we create, we looked at 30 of the top 100 images of the year from imgur.com as voted on Reddit.com (one of the top sharing sites in the world). We then surveyed 60 viewers to find out which emotions each image activated for them. We used Robert Plutchik’s comprehensive Wheel of Emotion as our categorization. What we found was compelling:
1. Negative emotions were less commonly found in highly viral content than positive emotions, but viral success was still possible when negative emotion also evoked anticipation and surprise.
2. Certain specific emotions were extremely common in highly viral content, while others were extremely uncommon. Emotions that fit into the surprise and anticipation segments of Plutchik’s wheel were overwhelmingly represented. Specifically:
- Curiosity
- Amazement
- Interest
- Astonishment
- Uncertainty
3. The emotion of admiration was very commonly found in highly shared content, an unexpected result.
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