Success isn’t all about bloody hard work.
Granted, it can be a critical component of success, but only if applied to the right activities or tasks, and when combined with working smart.
You’re tweeting, pinning, and circling, and slaving over your next blog post. One of your posts could use some editing, and you still haven’t started on your next guest post.
Sigh!
Wouldn’t it be nice to see one of your blog posts spread like a conflagration?
You sure deserve overnight success. Imagine waking up one morning and seeing a massive spike in your site traffic. Hundreds of people have retweeted or shared your post, out of nowhere.
That’s what we mean when we talk about viral marketing – this begs the question, “is it all tied to luck?”
Read on to find out. But first, for the uninitiated:
What’s Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is a marketing technique or promotional strategy that induces other users or websites to pass on your marketing messages to other users or websites through sharing or word of mouth, thus creating exponential growth or distribution of your message visibility and effect.
It’s how brands get their messages to spread like wildfire, either by accident or deliberate.
What does Viral Marketing mean to Businesses?
It’s every business person’s wish that their content might someday go viral.
Why so?
Because content virality translates to a dramatic increase in your organic reach and brand awareness overnight or over a short period.
A prime example of this is the IHOb campaign.
In just 10 days, the campaign had managed to garner an excess of 1.2 million tweets, and sparked a furious debate on various social channels and news media.
How Viral Campaigns Work?
In theory, viral campaigns are very easy to create. All you have to do is create a video or write a blog post that’s very attractive to your target audience and then publish it online. Promote it vigorously after that.
That’s pretty much like it. The next thing you want to do is watch as the fuse lights, and thousands and thousands of users share the content like crazy.
In some cases, your content might go viral by accident. You never planned for anything, but for some reason, users couldn’t help sharing it or talking about it to their friends and families. And in no time, it became an online sensation.
Viral Marketing In Singapore
After the successes of these companies, viral marketing has become the current big thing in Singapore. Many entities are putting in a lot of efforts in this kind of marketing to become successful just the same way these companies did. This has created a whole new niche for companies that offer this enhanced form of online marketing. Companies such as Made Viral, Hashmeta, and Construct Digital are some of the companies that have sprung up to take advantage of this phenomenal opportunity. Viral marketing in Singapore is a well-balanced niche market with equal demand and supply.
Viral marketing is a marketing technique or promotional strategy that induces other users or websites to pass on your marketing messages to other users or websites through sharing or word of mouth, thus creating exponential growth or distribution of your message visibility and effect.
It’s how brands get their messages to spread like wildfire, either by accident or deliberate.
How to Conduct Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is not that easy to execute successfully. Without knowledge and strategy, you could end up expending a lot of resources without results in the end. That is the reason why many businesses choose to hire professional services. Of cause, that involves money and for a small startup, it can be an overwhelming expense. If you do not have adequate financial muscles for a professional viral marketing campaign, the good news is that you can execute your own campaign successfully.
This is how to go about it:
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Social Media
Social media is an integral part of viral marketing. Without it, this kind of marketing definitely would not be possible. After all, how would your contents go viral without relying on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and more? So, begin by signing your business to all the major social media platforms that brands use for promotion and audience engagement purposes. The best part is that this is free and therefore you do not need to worry about cost.
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Identify Your Target Audience
Who are your products or services targeting? Is it men or women? Adults or children? Or are they meant for everyone? Identifying your audience is vital in a viral marketing campaign as it enables you to reach out only to people who are actually looking for products or services such as yours. Without that, it is easy to present your products or services to the wrong audience that will instead ignore your promotion campaigns, hindering those from going viral.
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Understand Your Target Audience
Identifying your audience is not enough, you need to understand it as well to be able to get positive results with your campaign. Are they budget-conscious buyers who are looking for cheaper products or are they people who do not mind spending as long as quality is guaranteed? When you know your buyers, it is easy to tailor make your promotional campaign for them so that you do not pitch expensive high-end stuff to low-budget consumers and vice versa.
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Create Content with High Engagement
Audience engagement is another integral part of any viral marketing campaign. If you cannot keep your audience engaged, your audience cannot share your campaign either so that it goes viral. So how do you capture the attention of these people? The answer is; by providing relevant content that answers their questions and provides a solution. Digital marketing is no longer about keywords and other SEO aspects alone. It is about capturing the interest of your audience too. If you can achieve that, you can be successful in your viral marketing campaign.
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Offer a Reward
The one surefire strategy to promote your brand effectively is to offer rewards. People love to be rewarded for doing something not only because they gain, but also because it gives them a sense of appreciation. Calls-to-action like “share this for a chance to win a trip to Disneyland,” or “share this for a chance to win cash” will motivate and encourage your readers to share your content in the hope that they could actually win a trip to an amazing destination or win money. With numerous shares by your readers, you can be sure that your marketing campaigns will go viral.
Why is Viral Marketing Important?
- Low Cost: What distinguishes viral marketing from any other marketing strategy is the fact that users do much of the work, which goes on to drastically cut your dispersion cost. You don’t have to buy media or advertising space.
- Potential Great Reach: A viral video can expose your brand or product to a huge international audience with little to no investment and minimal effort on your part. That explains why it’s every business’s dream to someday go viral.
- Less Invasive: Viral content doesn’t invade anyone’s space, considering it’s the user who decides on whether or not they want to participate in the campaign or share your content around.
- Great for Building Your Brand: Getting your content to go viral equates to hitting the bull’s eye in content creation. It takes a lot of creativity and great content production skills to pull this off. You have to create content that’s so incredible that users will have a hard time resisting to share it around.
Viral marketing is, without doubt, a powerful awareness and branding tool to wield in the competitive era of digital marketing.
3 Prime Examples of Viral Marketing Campaigns
Some brands have success stories to tell about viral campaigns. They pulled it off, and everything changed for them.
Here are three companies that succeeded in using viral marketing as their ticket to success:
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IHOp’s IHOb
In 2018, IHOp used a single tweet to stir an online bedlam. They were changing their company name from IHOp to IHOb, without revealing what the b meant.
Instead, they threw the ball to the public by letting them guess what the b stood for. Social media users had to play a lot of speculations and ended up fuelling a fire online. Confusion ensued until they decided to reveal the meaning. Turns out, the b stood for Burgers.
And from that campaign, they were able to rake in over $113 million in earned media. Their burger sales increased significantly. It was a controversial campaign that turned out to be a huge success.
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Dumb Ways to Die
In 2012, Metro Trains organised a safety campaign to encourage commuters to act safely around trains. Instead of taking a more pedestrian approach, like putting scaring posts and running off-putting ads, they used their creativity to come up with a viral campaign dubbed “Dumb Ways to Die.”
It was a simple video that would go on to make over 60 million dollars in media impressions.
But that’s’ beside the point: the video managed to create more awareness of train safety, reducing rail-related accidents by a whopping 20%.
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Oreo
Viral marketing doesn’t always have to be spontaneous. You can also seize the moment and take advantage of sizzling trends.
Oreo’s tweet, “Dunk in the Dark,” is a classic example of how this works, and all they did was take advantage of the 2013 Super Bowl.
You can’t plan for such content, but you can be quick-witted to come up with something creative that will blow up people’s minds and get them to share it around.
Characteristics of Viral Campaigns: What do they All Have in Common?
Viral messages and content are hard to define — especially so because they tend to vary from one business to another.
But three distinct elements are common with almost any viral marketing campaign you’re likely to come across online.
They’re the element that marketers should be using to assess their campaigns for the potential to generate a substantial amount of social buzz.
Here are the distinguishing characteristics of viral-worthy content:
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They’re Organic
You can’t force a piece of content to go viral.
That’s where most companies go wrong. They’re convinced that a viral campaign might help them with slumping sales. It might help them attract a younger and more vibrant audience, and give their brand more exposure.
So, what do they do?
They pump in a lot of money and invest more of their resources into making their content go viral.
But it always never works for them.
Because?
Viral campaigns are as organic as they come. If anything, it isn’t even viral if users aren’t naturally motivated to share it around themselves.
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They’re Timely
Trends have a time limit. They come, and before you even get the time to bat your eyelids, they’re gone.
Viral marketing is like starting up a new trend. You sure you only have a limited time before the dust settles, and that you only have a short window of time in which to act.
Failure of which all your efforts will be in vain.
You can’t be doing Gangnam style videos in 2022, and expect them to attract the same amount of attention they drew 8 years ago.
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They’re Bold
Viral marketing is a risky endeavour.
You have to do something extraordinary to grab people’s attention. That means going against what’s the norm, a strategy that could easily backfire on you, attract backlash, or even taint your reputation.
It’s a fine line between starting something trendy or coming off as corny or cheesy.
Your viral marketing campaign doesn’t have to be controversial. But it sure must possess something otherworldly.
And then there’s an even bigger risk – going viral for all the wrong reasons. It could be that your ad is promoting something illegal, or rubs a certain section of the population the wrong way.
Is Viral Marketing a Feasible Marketing Strategy for Your Brand?
To be honest – by every definition of the term, going viral is tough, almost unpredictable, and untraceable.
There’s the part where you have to leave everything to chance.
You can however increase the odds of your content going viral. First, you have to make sure your content is flammable.
There are tools and tips to help you with all this, and that’s what we’re planning to cover in the remaining sections of this article.
6 Reasons Your Content Never Goes Viral
Why is it so easy for some people to produce viral content, while you’re here struggling to achieve the viral lift-off?
It’s simple: you haven’t gotten the formula yet, at least not quite right.
It takes a certain amount of creativity, idea, emotional connection, and technical SEO laced with a certain amount of luck to produce content with the potential to go viral.
Here are a few explanations as to why none of your content has ever gone viral.
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It Doesn’t Evoke an Emotional Connection
Try analysing a few viral content pieces.
What do they all have in common?
They trigger an emotional connection with you. Whether it’s warming your heart, cracking you up, or triggering empathy, they all feed off your emotions.
You could create a high-end video, fill it up with A-list celebrities. But if it’s not evoking an emotional connection, the chances of it’s going are close to zero.
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You’re NOT thinking Out of the Box
Your content will never go viral if all you’re doing is reproducing the same half-baked truths already filling up the internet corridors.
Learn to produce original content by thinking outside the box.
Wear the mind of the reader and ask yourself if they’ll be taken aback when watching your video or reading your article.
If your answer is no, then rule out all possibility of that piece of content ever going viral.
Lace your content with shock value, and you wouldn’t even have to ask your readers to share it around.
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You’re Not Optimising Your Content Right for SEO
Before someone can share your content, they have to find it first. You want to make sure the piece can be easily found on search engines.
Here are a few tips on how to optimise your viral content right:
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- Your title must be clear, straightforward, and appealing. Try to make it very clickable by thinking outside the box.
- Incorporate your primary keywords into your title and headings
- Have a backlink generating strategy
- Share your content on various social media channels. – talking of 1000 plus shares
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For Videos: Your YouTube Channel Isn’t Thriving
Don’t get it all wrong: YouTube isn’t the only video streaming platform out there. Take Facebook, for example — their videos attract over 4 billion eyeballs every day.
Still, when optimising your videos to go viral, the first platform you want to milk dry and not leave anything to chance is YouTube.
You need to work on YouTube visibility. Focus on the number of YouTube views, likes, and comments the video is attracting. You need an active YouTube channel for this.
Make sure you’re regularly uploading videos to your YouTube channel and growing your list of subscribers. The more active your channel, the more your videos are likely to go viral.
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Your Viral Marketing Strategy Isn’t Part of a Larger Marketing Strategy
Viral marketing should be part of a larger content marketing strategy (not a standalone marketing strategy).
Your content can only make a big splash when it’s part of a well-thought-out content marketing strategy.
You need to start by priming your email subscribers and social media followers with the right mood. Make sure your audience is used to your sense of humour. Reel them in slowly by slowly until they get used to that side of you before hitting them with the viral piece you’ve been working on.
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You’re not just lucky
Even after doing all you’re supposed to do and still not succeeded in making just one of your videos to go viral, then this is where you blame it all on luck.
It’s true: you might have a viral-worthy piece of content, but that doesn’t guarantee it will go viral.
Luck, timing, planetary alignments, and experienced choreographer, all go into making a video go viral.
The point is to forget about making your videos go viral and instead focus on creating a market-moving masterpiece. Keep doing this, and in the event that one of your content ever goes viral, you can be sure some of the viewers will be visiting your earlier gems and appreciate you even more for them.
Viral Marketing Vs. Buzz Marketing Vs. Word of Mouth: How Are They Different?
Isn’t viral marketing the same as buzz marketing?
Well, not exactly.
You’ve probably heard about these three marketing terms: Word of Mouth, Viral Marketing, and Buzz Marketing.
Some people use them interchangeably.
But they’re all fundamentally different.
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Word of Mouth
Word of Mouth is organic at its finest.
Word of Mouth Marketing is when customers’ interest in your company products and services is manifested in the conversations they have.
Since every marketer wants to make their business or product a hot topic in their consumers’ conversations, it’s the easiest of the three to recognise.
Ever recommended a product, business, or service to anyone? Well, that’s Word of Mouth in Action.
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Buzz Marketing
Buzz Marketing takes word of mouth to a whole another level. It’s where interest meets shock value.
It’s where you wow, excite, or shock your customers to get them talking about your business, instead of just waiting for them to naturally talk about your business.
Buzz marketing is quite flexible and could work with any other marketing strategy out there: guerrilla marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and so on.
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Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is all about the content that spreads like a conflagration across channels.
It’s about getting your marketing message out and making it shareable for your readers and viewers to share it around with the people they know.
It’s a mix of the word of mouth and buzzing marketing, but for digital platforms.
OCBC Bank’s Viral Hunt the Mouse Marketing Campaign
In 2017, OCBC Bank, Singapore partnered with Sqkii to raise awareness on its new payment solution app, OCBC Pay Anyone, through a powerful viral marketing campaign.
The app unifies all promotions, offers, and discounts on a single platform. It also gives users the ability to scan QR codes to make payments.
The Hunt the Mouse campaign, which enabled the bank to secure a Bronze in the recent MobEx Awards 2018, involved a mouse hunt to engage and reward its customers.
Sqkii, which developed the OCBC Pay Anyone app, had not been so famous until it began organising a series of cash hunts, with OCBC bank, to promote the app and itself.
Participants needed to collect hints and piece them together to find where the SG$50,000 was hidden. In return, the bank offered an SG$50,000 grand prize for anyone who would find where the money was hidden. This encouraged more people to take part, allowing the company to realise its objectives.
During the campaign, Sqkii would post three daily hints daily on its Facebook Page to point participants in the right direction. Those who were participating in this mouse could collect extra hints (in the form of scratch cards) when they make use of the app’s QR feature at participating outlets. This saw many people who were looking to gain an extra edge download the app and use it, which was in line with the bank’s campaign objectives.
When Sqkii posted the first announcement post, which included an image of a box of bills to Facebook, the post received more than 100 shares in less than 5 minutes. Hunt the Mouse campaign became viral right from the start. The initial post reached 746,191 unique individuals and garnered 3,400 shares as well as over 7,300 comments.
At the end of the 23-day viral marketing campaign, the results were overwhelming. The campaign had achieved more than 500,000 page views, 2,155,289 clicks, and 26,801 reactions, comments, as well as shares.
Scoot Airlines Viral Social Marketing Campaign
Scoot Airlines is a popular low-cost airline offering international flights to different countries, including Australia. This relatively new airline, which is owned by Singapore Airlines, has had massive success in viral marketing online in the past, which is attributed to the fact that it chose a very unusual strategy for promoting the brand.
The social media strategy that was adopted by this company entailed collaborating more with its soon-to-be customers. Scoot included its Facebook fans in the process of creating the brand – right from the beginning.
One of the first things the company did was to run a Facebook competition to determine the brand’s tagline. After over 3,000 entries, it selected ‘Get outta here!’ that was proposed by two of its fans on Facebook, as its tag line.
The company went ahead to run a promotion through its social networks to let fans ‘decide’ the upcoming air ticket prices by reducing the proposed prices every time a new fan would sign up to be a member.
The airline even involved its social media community to help with the recruitment process, introduce the Scoot team members (individually) and share relevant tips on how to offer better customer service.
All of these strategies yielded significant results. Even before getting a plane off the ground, Scoot Airlines had already built a massive social media community, with 50,000 fans on its Facebook page, doubling that, which Qantas, a 97-year old airline, had secured in mid-2011. It had garnered over 20,000 views and tens of thousands of reactions in the early stages of setting up the business. By the time the airline was ready to roll, the demand had already surpassed what the company could meet.
BLENDTEC Viral Marketing Campaign Case Study
BLENDTEC a leading industrial blender manufacture decided to sell its blenders direct to consumers through YouTube commercials. In these commercials, we see a lot of humour and creativity, which yields great results.
Tom Dickson who is a CEO of a particular company blends iPads, iPhones, golf balls, and broom handles in a Blendtec blender to demonstrate the product’s effectiveness and toughness.
One of the key factors that many buyers are looking for in an industrial blender is resilience. Due to the rigorous nature of their work, industrial blenders degrade fast. But this video commercial demonstrates that it takes a lot to destroy BLENDTEC products.
Due to that demonstration plus some humour and creativity, this content keeps viewers engaged and it receives 10,000,000+ views. The product’s website, on the other hand, receives 120,000,000+ visitors in the month the commercials launch and the company’s sales increases by 700% +.
Talk to MediaOne – Singapore’s leading digital marketing agency on how we can make your campaign really engaging so that you can get it viral.
All marketers want to launch marketing campaigns that are not only effective but viral. However, creating and launching a viral marketing campaign is easier said than done. The following tips will help.
Make it valuable and relevant
For people to share something, be it a video or image, it has to provide value. Something is valuable to your audience if it contains useful information about your brand, and explains why people should buy your products.
Value is not the only quality; the piece also has to be relevant to your audience. You can make a marketing campaign relevant by relating it to current events and trends. For example, during an elections year, incorporate something relating to elections in your marketing campaign.
Write your ideas
As a marketer or business owner, marketing ideas cross your mind very often. Jot down these ideas, and later analyze their practicability. Build on those that are practical; you may be surprised when they turn out to be viral.
You need not have a pen and paper everywhere you go. You can use the Notes or To-do app on your phone or use other note-taking apps such as Evernote, Todoist, and Any.Do.
Execute the marketing campaign properly
The execution of a marketing campaign idea determines whether it will go viral. The truth is some campaigns go viral accidentally, but to be sure you need to plan properly. All the written components of the campaign need to be well thought and flawless.
For a video, make the script creative such that it will be share-worthy. Carefully plan the design of an infographic and make sure the text evokes the required emotions. No amount of planning for viral content is enough but do your best.
Make it easy to share
While a virus may spread effortlessly from one person to another, the sharing of viral content requires effort on your side. Make those social sharing buttons visible on every page of your website. Upload the viral content on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Include appropriate hashtags for easier sharing.
Social media sharing determines whether or not content is viral. The more the shares and comments the more viral your campaign is. The result is increased brand awareness and conversion rates.
Not all viral marketing Singapore campaigns are successful. You have to plan carefully and optimize for social media for the campaign to go viral. If you are not confident you can launch such a campaign, then hire the best SEO agency in Singapore. Only the best can transform your marketing ideas to viral marketing campaigns that will leave your competition in the dust.
FAQs
What are things need for Viral Marketing campaign?
– Identify Your Target Audience
– Understand Your Target Audience
– Create Content with High Engagement
– Offer a Reward