Viral Marketing: What Is It and How Can You Use It?

Digital marketing grew rapidly these past few years. There are more instruments to use and campaigns to run today, allowing businesses – from small businesses to giant enterprises – to achieve their marketing objectives in an efficient and measurable way.

While content marketing and social media are very popular, more businesses are turning to viral marketing as a way to generate buzz and attract a bigger audience. What is viral marketing and how can you use it? We are going to answer those questions in this article.

What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing is a type of marketing campaign that utilizes existing websites and networks of users to deliver key marketing messages to a wider audience. By targeting key users on different platforms, the same marketing messages can reach a vast number of viewers in a relatively short amount of time.

Viral marketing differs from conventional content or social media marketing in one particular way: this type of campaign relies on the content of the campaign to be interesting enough for it to go viral. When the campaign is configured properly, a simple marketing message can get thousands of shares and re-shares across multiple platforms.

In most cases, viral marketing uses video content. Audio-visual contents work better in attracting user engagement and persuading the audience to share the content with more people. At the same time, video content adds that extra dimension for a bigger chance of going viral.

How Can You Do Viral Marketing?

From the definition of viral marketing itself, it is easy to see the elements you need to prepare for a successful viral marketing campaign. For starters, you need to determine the platforms you want to target for the campaign. Aside from popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, we also have sites that specialize in viral and funny content such as apextribune.com.

Understanding the platforms you’ll be using and the audience you want to target is important. The insights will help you tailor your content perfectly; once again, the goal of fine-tuning the message is to increase its chances of going viral once viewers start seeing it.

Once the campaign is carefully formulated, you can start executing the plan and let the audience to the rest. Keep in mind that not all content will go viral upon impact. That brings us to the next part of this article: how to go viral.

How to Go Viral

There is no definitive secret or recipe to going viral. The biggest challenge of viral marketing is getting the campaign accepted by the audience the right way. Only then will you see the impact of the campaign amplified to new heights.

That said, you can take steps to increase the chances of your campaign going viral. Adding gamification, understanding the audience’s taste and preferences, and using content that relates well to the target viewers are some of the tips you can use to get started. Do it right and viral marketing can catapult your brand and your products or services like no other digital marketing instrument.