Want to make use of viral marketing as an essential marketing strategy? Well, you can’t. You can create a message and hope it’s good enough to spread. Our CEO at World Wide Creative, Fred Roed wrote a post on how to make a viral video. His answer was simple – you don’t. Fred explains that “there’s no way you can make a viral video. You can only make a video. Your audience will make it viral.
According to Seth Godin Viral marketing is an idea that spreads” and while it is spreading, helps market your business or cause. Viral marketing includes creating funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, images, and even plain text. It can really help you increase traffic to your website or blog.
It is important to make sure your content is of value. It should be worth passing along. For Mike Perk, you have to offer something that is unique and inventive – something your audience can relate to.
Now, this is crucial – if your content is too promotional people will see right through it! On the other hand, if your content is too vague and does not represent your company – what’s the point? Seth explains that marketers are “obsessed” with free media and often enough they create content that are absolutely viral but doesn’t do any marketing at all. Seth says it straight: “Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way”.
There are off course some barriers to viral marketing you should try to avoid. When making use of video clips or streaming video, check its size. If it’s too large to receive, you are cutting people out of the loop. Also, make sure your message is in a format most people can use. It really is all about making it as easy and user-friendly as possible for people to view.
So, if you want to make use of viral marketing, do it right from the start. Viral marketing could be extremely valuable to your business but if done wrong the damage to your brand can be immense.
Read more posts by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg
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One other point to viral marketing: after the 5% effort it takes to come up with a great viral idea, it requires the additional 95% perspiration or it will be unlikely to succeed. Sometimes marketers ignore the hard work of seeding the concept, followed by constant watering, before the idea bears fruit.
The Tipping Point has some interesting things say about what is needed to make something viral. But just like viruses need the right environment to infect the host so to does the viral video. IT might be true that you can’t create a viral video but I’m sure you can increase its probably of becoming one.
I find the best viral video’s are those that happened by accident. The spontaneity and originality of a video will furthermore add to it’s popularity online.