As a brand owner in 2020, there is a reasonable expectation for you to know how to do viral marketing. This receives support through extensive research. According to PEW research, there are 70% of people in the United States that utilize at least a single social media platform. Additionally, there are over 2.5 billion people today that are on social media worldwide. This number is rapidly growing as the digital age grows.
As an entrepreneur, you have to take advantage of the developments of the digital era. A large part of success in entrepreneurship today is gained through social media. Garnering followers and a user base can be an arduous task as time progresses.
Therefore, you should cater to a mindset that is open to new ideas. One of such scheme is the use of viral marketing campaigns. If you know how to do viral marketing, you can increase your brand awareness through social media.
Virality is best as an Exponential Curve
In other words, the best way to execute viral marketing is through the use of shares. So, if two friends that are fans of your brand decide to share a piece of content, those shares will grow to over a billion people if that figure doubles 30 times. This is the power of viral marketing.
For a business, viral marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. This is the reason for the success of many brands over the years. For example, Facebook is the perfect storm of the power of viral marketing.
When a brand can recognize an opportunity and accurately adapt, there will be a high chance of successful viral marketing. Some of the best brands include Facebook and Lyft. Also, many businesses launch a product that becomes so viral that it elevates that brand permanently.
1. Define Your Audience
When you create viral content, it’s best if you have a solid understanding of your audience. Viral content and marketing, in general, only useful for brands that can be convincing to an audience. When your audience is so convinced with your content, they should have a natural tendency to share your content.
In social media marketing, there should be a marketing persona for you to start an excellent viral marketing campaign. A marketing persona is what serves as a representation of a target customer. The way this works is through demographic and psychographic information.
Demographic information is the knowledge from localities and specific areas. On the other hand, psychographic information is knowledge, with the analysis of different factors like personalities, values, and opinions. In total, all this information is excellent for learning people’s social media behavior patterns and preferences in the content that they consume.
2. Create a marketing persona
Also, in digital marketing, it’s best if you create a marketing persona for your campaigns. The best way to do this is through interviewing and surveying on real customers as well as potential customers to your business. The questions should aim towards their purchase mentality and considerations during social media use. With this information, you can ensure that your team will create content that has a high likelihood of receiving shares.
3. Utilize an excellent social media platform
All social media platforms are different. So, if you want to create good content, it’s best to choose a platform that is worth specializing in. In other words, the content you wish to give virality will vary from platforms. Therefore, you should choose a platform according to your audience and content. Granted, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are great platforms for starting a successful viral marketing campaign.
If you decide to use Facebook for your content as a platform, you should be thinking about selling the product in a compelling and personal way to consumers. If you have a caption or a body of text that shows your experience with the unique product, you have begun a process that will lead to the success of the product.
On the contrary, when creating content for Instagram, you have to think about Instagram Stories, which are a great way to spark shares. IG stories are easy to share and view; therefore, all you need to a good story is a relevant and excellent caption.
When you choose a platform, you should create content that reflects the marketing persona you’ve made for your strategies.
On many social media platforms, they use algorithms for ranking content. These algorithms work on a scale of the likelihood of user engagement. So, the content that should be popular with your audience has to be what ranks at the top of their pages and yours. Therefore, you should have less engaging content that will rank at the bottom.
When your content receives engagement, there will be more users that will accept such content in their feed. The sure way to do this is to get shares on your content. However, if there aren’t a lot of shares, you can still gain more views because Social Media algorithms utilize a detection system for recommending trends to demographics and psychographics.
When a piece of content does not generate engagement, it will bury in the rubble of many other pieces of content. As a result, viral marketing should be a focus on content that makes high engagement rates.
5. Use your content as a platform for your maximum audience reach
When you’ve created content, you have to ensure it has the optimal performance that it can possibly reach. So, you should release the material at a time that it will gain high visibility from your audience and social media in general. You should ideally schedule your timing according to your audience’s activity rates.
In other words, toward the preferences of your audience. Also, you should factor in the social media platform you are using. How? Well, you should understand how people use the platform at different times of the day.
Because sometimes, there are people with active business accounts during the weekdays and active personal accounts at other times. So, you should factor in considerations like that.
With the specifications and preference recommendations, some social media platforms increase the visibility of content based on user engagement visibility. Also, when the material releases at a perfect time, this is what leads to the social media “perfect storm” of virality.
6. Increase your visibility through advertisements
Advertisements are another great way to help boost the virality of your content. In a lot of cases, ads are what help play the final role in promoting your content to viral status. For smaller businesses, advertising is a great way to increase your chances of virality.
When you have paid advertisements on a social media page, you can boost your campaign’s visibility. Facebook ads are a great advertising platform to begin your paid ads use. It is a relatively cheap service compared to other platforms, and your ads have a much higher chance of receiving engages. However, you should ensure you post the ads the right way.
A good tip for your paid ads is the use of influencers to advertise your products. So, when influencers share these ads, they will have a broad audience that will likely take an interest. More so, when the influencer is within your demographic and psychographic audience.
7. Make use of a social media influencer
When you make use of marketing tactics, it’s best if you use an influencer marketing strategy. However, close to 95% of people in digital marketing have an active use of this strategy. With Social media influencers, there is improved reach for your campaigns that will help you with how to do viral marketing.
8. You should create performance criteria to execute better future campaigns
In today’s environments with a majority of people in the world with constant digital engagement, there is an inherent need for digital marketers to utilize analytics tools. Social media analytics tools help you measure your performance at an estimated accuracy.
However, you should note that your marketing campaign won’t become a viral sensation immediately. Instead, you should learn to exercise patience in order to learn from your mistakes and improve from subsequent tries. So, you should use the metrics and performance statistics to guide your strategies.
When you are creating your viral marketing campaign, your main consideration should not be virality. Instead, emphasize the main focus towards the creation of useful and relevant content that will build a network of relations with your audience. Therefore, have a utility-based mentality to your content.
Conclusion
So, you have read the ways you can learn viral marketing. But, in order to successfully execute these tips on how to do viral marketing, you should be ready to learn from mistakes. Also, you have to be prepared to try multiple times until you find your sweet spot. This is because no two businesses should be the same.
If that’s the case, virality won’t be possible. To be viral, you have to be unique in a sea of similar things. You have to give your audience something they haven’t been given before.