When it comes to social media, there are many ways to reach your audience, raise brand awareness, and develop useful and lasting partnerships in cost-effective ways. One such method for boosting your brand's visibility and making the most of digital marketing is to create viral marketing campaigns or campaigns designed to go viral across different social networks.
10PM Curfew is here to help you get started. We have insight into the marketing strategy options that fit your needs and the best options for growing your social media channels. Learn about how you can boost your brand and make the next marketing message go viral with support from our team today.
What Is a Viral Marketing Campaign?
Before you can begin to develop ad campaigns that go viral, it’s useful to understand what successful viral marketing looks like and to dive deep into some examples of viral marketing. When your content goes viral, you suddenly become very popular across social media channels in real time.
This can happen on any social media platform or even several different social media platforms, and you’ll want to build your social media strategy with content that is easy to share and engage with.
Some viral marketing campaigns are cases where content creators can add their own spins — for example, memes allow you to insert your own specific content to visuals or audio. Some challenges, like the ALS ice bucket challenge that raised awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the ALS association, can also allow you to add your own spin or element of surprise.
Other examples are viral elements specifically related to brands, like the Red Bull Superbowl commercials or the “Like a Girl” campaign.
The point of a viral campaign or marketing effort is to get your brand message in front of customers’ eyes — and the more accessible, shareable, and customizable your content is, the more likely you are to reach a wide audience using solely word-of-mouth.
How To Run a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
Viral content is great for your business, especially if you’re just starting out and looking to grow your startup without spending much money. But how exactly do you go viral? While it can be difficult to pin down virality, you can take a few simple steps to make your content more likely to go viral, including some of the following.
Know Your Audience
The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to appeal to their interests. If you reach the right consumers, they’re more likely to share content with friends and family and push that content’s popularity in an organic way.
Knowing your audience also allows you to tailor the content you create to that specific type of consumer, which means there’s a higher chance they’ll engage, like, and share that content, increasing your chances of going viral.
It also means that if you do spend money on paid ad campaigns, that money is more likely to stretch further and get you closer to virality since it’s reaching the right people.
Tap Into Trends
One of the best ways to make your video marketing go viral on TikTok or get a lot of retweets is to tap into the content that is already going viral. That could mean doing popular challenges or using sounds or songs that are already trending.
It means people are more likely to engage with your content since they recognize the familiar format and may even respond with their own challenges. The algorithms on popular social media sites also tend to prioritize popular and trending sounds and images, which means that they’re more likely to go viral than entirely original content.
Partner With the Right People
There are many benefits to developing partnerships with the right content creators, even beyond virality. Consumers tend to trust content creators, and so their mark of approval means it’s more likely that your brand will grow and that customers will purchase or consume your product.
If you are partnered with the right person, you’re also more likely to reach broader audiences, which increases your chances of being pushed by the algorithms.
Think carefully about who you’re partnering with, especially if you want to go viral. Some partnerships are obvious, like collaborating with a model to showcase your new fashion line. But often, virality occurs when something happens that’s a little out of the ordinary, so think about who might be an unusual partner but one that can make you and your business stand out when it comes to your digital content.
Use Shareable Content
Different social platforms have different content needs. For instance, infographics do well on Instagram, and multimedia does well on TikTok. This appeal is always changing, so you want to regularly check in on the best durations, colors, and content types for the different social media platforms.
All that said, shareable, consumable, and attractive content will always be king for going viral. You want to catch people’s attention and make the content appealing enough that they’ll want to stick around — and even share the content. You do want to tailor the content to represent your brand but think about how you can serve your audience.
Educational information, behind-the-scenes looks, or exclusives are all things that will make your audience want to stick around, and you’ll want to let them know what’s available from your brand.
Make the Most of Hashtags
It can be overwhelming to find the best hashtags for your business, but the truth of the matter is that hashtags really work. While there are ways to tap into trending hashtags, it tends to be more useful to rely on hashtags that are related specifically to your brand. If you stray too far from the topic, your content may be hidden or not reaching the right audiences.
Hashtags allow you to better find your target audience and bring in customers from different areas of the social media platform. Consider creating a master list for yourself so you know what hashtags are trending or doing well for which ad campaigns and how you can make the most of search terms and options for your next digital ad.
Utilize SEO
Using hashtags can be a great way to optimize your content for search, but it’s only the beginning. SEO, or search engine optimization, makes your content more appealing to search engines. Typically, you optimize for SEO on websites and platforms with longer content, but applying an SEO framework to your social media development can also be useful.
In part, that’s because many social media platforms can serve as search engines, like LinkedIn for jobs and Pinterest for recipes. It’s also a good idea to overlay an SEO framework simply because it allows you to make the most of the space and tag options available to you.
One of the best ways to do this is by tracking the analytics that are available for your different social sites. Look at which ads are doing the best and consider changing out a few words or images at a time. Optimizing your content for search will help you have a wide reach and grow your business without stress.
Conclusion
Designing an ad campaign to go viral is like trying to catch lightning. That said, if you lay down a lot of lightning rods, you are more likely to get that burst of electricity and brightness that can make the difference. Developing viral social media campaigns is just like setting down lightning rods.
The more steps you take, like developing sharable content, reaching the right audiences, and hopping onto trending sounds and challenges, the more likely you are to achieve that viral status. And once you’re viral, you can watch brand awareness grow.
10PM Curfew is here to help with all your digital messaging and branding needs. We make it easy to connect with the content creators perfect for growing your brand, and we have a closer look at what’s trending on social and how social algorithms are changing all the time.
We even make it easy to join our team so you can use and grow your platform with other businesses just like yours. See what makes social media campaigns work and begin developing an ad to go viral with the support of 10PM Curfew today.
Sources
What Is Viral Marketing? (With Steps for Successful Implementation) | Indeed.com
What Is an Infographic? Examples and Design Tips | Indeed.com
How do you use hashtags effectively to boost your online visibility and reach? | LinkedIn