Whichever industry you are in, you have to spread your wings in order to grow. You have to grow your brand and extend your products’ market reach for your company to withstand the huge competition that every industry is facing today. There is a cliché that if a business fails to expand, the obvious outcome is that it shrinks. That cliché is very accurate. When companies fail to attract new audiences, fail to make inroads in new regions, and ignore the need for targeting new demographics, they often end up becoming smaller and eventually extinct.
With that understanding, you have to constantly look for effective ways to boost your website traffic. You need to redesign your marketing strategies in order to make them explosive and convincing. One such way is viral marketing.
Viral marketing is a marketing strategy in which you create online content that is so convincing and inspiring that your target audience spreads and shares it with their friends. It’s similar to word-of-mouth advertising, except that much of it happens online. If you wish to promote your brand using viral marketing, your focus should be to create content that has the potential to “go viral.” Here are 7 steps that will help you come up with viral content for your marketing campaign.
1. Prepare for growth. A successful viral marketing campaign will bring you explosive growth. That means more customers, more online traffic, more markets, and more client demographics. Are you ready for that growth? Make sure that your web hosting is readied for huge online traffic, your offline store has sufficient inventory, and your overall merchant is prepared for a sudden upsurge in sales. If your marketing campaign is explosive but fails to satisfy your new customers, your brand reputation can be damaged irredeemably.
2. Know your target audience. Who are you targeting with your viral marketing campaign? Many marketers make the mistake of developing viral content that will resonate with everyone. When you create content for everyone, you are actually creating it for no one. You cannot appeal to everyone. No one has ever managed to do that. Know your audience, find out what they love about your products and what their needs really are, and then tailor your content to their heart’s desire, product needs, and personal lives.
3. Have a clear message. Your main goal is to speak to the heart of an individual customer. Ensure that the message is clear, it’s in the language that the customer understands best, and it inspires and motivates. It’s true that most viral campaigns are accidental, but that should never be an excuse for not sufficiently planning your campaign.
4. Find the right channel. Your message could have all the makings of viral content, but it won’t reach many people if you share it on the wrong platforms. You have to disseminate it through the channels that house most of your target customers. If you want the message to reach a youthful audience, for example, you have a better shot if you share it on Instagram rather than Facebook. If you decide to share it on Facebook, make sure you do so to the groups of members that can relate to that content. Other important channels that will help you promote to, and reach, a wide audience include Twitter and YouTube.
5. Offer an incentive for anyone who shares your content. Promise to offer a free product or cash prize for anyone who shares a post on Facebook promoting your message and gets the most comments. If you are sending the content to an email list, include the option of referring friends, and then promise to reward the email subscriber who refers the newest subscribers. People will be competing for the incentive, which will force them to keep sharing your message, consequently making it viral.
6. Work on people’s emotions. Tug on your audiences’ emotions. For example, you can hire a comedian to send your message out in a humorous way. You can also make it sentimental if you know that it will catch emotions better and still inform your audience. Anything that inspires hope, makes people laugh, and offers solutions to fears and dreams is good for catching emotions.
7. Make your content visually oriented. You probably know that most viral messages are visual. Videos and images are easier for people to digest, which makes them easier to share. You will get more shares for a video than a block, static text.
