Summary
Creating viral content is an effective marketing tool that can reach thousands of views. Employ them in your marketing strategies and improve your audience engagement and, ultimately, your conversion.
Therefore, if you plan to create viral content for marketing, do it right by following these tips. Follow these fundamentals in viral content creation and improve your visibility.
Reaching the highest audience is among the primary goals of every advertisement. In this aspect, viral content can be an effective marketing device that propagates through shares and likes.
Viral content can also be self-sufficient as long as it can keep your audience engaged. So, what makes content viral, and how can you make one? That, I will be discussing in this article.
What Is Viral Content?
As implied by its name, viral content spreads fast in a huge user population or viewership. The “virality” may be in any digital platform where your target audience stays.
Viral content shall be designed to keep the audiences engaged and encourage them to share your content with more viewers. This fundamental role has to be fulfilled to make whatever you are advertising be seen by thousands.
What Makes A Viral Content?
Your content can be anything; it can be a video, an image, an article. It can be whatever as long as you have an audience or subscribers that can benefit from it in either a tangible or emotional manner.
The word here is “shareable”: create shareable content, and before you know it, you’ll see your analytics skyrocket.
The Benefits Of A Viral Content
So, what do you get from creating viral content? According to CleverTap, here are a few benefits you can get from viral marketing content:
- Low cost as it self propagates through shares
- Wider reach caused by widespread viewership
- The credibility of your brand or site increases through approval by the vast majority
Steps To Create A Viral Content
Now, the goal here is to make something shareable. In that aspect, I’ve compiled a list of steps that most effective content creation follows.
Do note; however, that luck still plays a part in a content’s virality. Nonetheless, following these steps will ensure you are a step nearer to getting the view counts you want.
Plus, the repetition of creating content for marketing gives you those juicy data that sets a base for your future marketing strategies. Now, let’s begin creating your viral content.
1. Research, Research, and Research
Yes. If three repeated words weren’t enough to emphasize its importance, I don’t know what else can. A meticulously made research is like a blueprint that you’ll use as a basis for your content creation.
Set your targets. Who are your audiences? What form will your content be? A hundred thousand views? A million? How long do you want your viewers to be engaged? What do they like?
Researching is the questioning phase. You got to figure out the essential question and answer them. Afterward, these answers you figured would soon mold up how or what your content should be like.
Also, don’t forget to check your previous campaigns’ analytics. These graphs and numbers will give you a hint of what to repeat and what to avoid. Thus, sharpening the probability of your new campaign’s success.
2. Know Thy Audience
“Know thy enemy and know thyself and you will win a hundred battles.” Yep, we are referencing The Art Of War by Sun Tzu here. But NO, we won’t be spilling any red stuff and conquering any country.
If anything, this age-old quote will help you conquer through your campaigns. It should be like this for your case, “Know thy audience and you shall get a hundred thousand views.”, sounds more fitting, right?
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The point is you should “target your audience” and ensure that whatever you’re creating will reach them. This part can be included in your research but is a whole new bag of chips to open and emphasize.
You’ll have to identify your physical and psychological demographics and cater content geared towards them.
3. Be Unique and Distinct
Mediocre is the last thing you’ll want your content to be. The target is to create impactful content that your audience will benefit from sharing.
Though not something you aspire to, terrible content can also be shareable if views are all you want. Aim for the extremes but never for the middle as only a few usually care for “typical.”
Take this Buffalo Wild Wings campaign, for example.
This campaign plays with a sense of humor that might only be possible for their brand. It may also pose a fun challenge shareable among friend groups in novelty.
Never stick to what is already existing, as typical techniques can be too bland for the short attention span of your audiences.
4. Entice Your Audience Through Your Concept
If research is your blueprint, your concept is the foundation of your content. It should be concise and appealing to your target audience to be valuable.
Whether it be a kangaroo wearing shoes or a colorful fondue, great content should at least deliver the following features, according to Forbes:
- It should be engaging
- It should provide value
- It shares a practice or culture
- It boosts clout or influence
- It exhibits passion
- It strengthens relationships
Think of your concept as the cherry atop a cake. It is the focal point and the bait for your audience to engage with your content.
Take the infamous Youtube click baits, for example. Although it was frowned upon early, it still exists as a necessary evil for viewership. The goal is to create an alluring or exaggerated bait but still deliver the content to prove value and meet audience expectations.
You can also include tags for social media posts to further increase your campaigns’ visibility. I’ve made this article called “Your Guide To Creating Search Engine Friendly Tags,” which will be helpful in that department.
5. Supplement With Quality Content
We all like picture books as kids. Do you know what kids and audiences have something similar? Short attention span.
If you plan on slapping just a chunk of texts for content, your engagement will plummet as Icarus did on the sea near Samos. Visuals are vital in improving the imagery in anything your content delivers.
Furthermore, these days, social media platforms favor fast, flashy, visual content in stopping any prospective audience from scrolling. Supplement your content with quality imagery, and you’ll retain more audience, plus the added aesthetics, if any, will make it more shareable.
6. Check Your Analytics
Let’s say you’ve released your campaign; how do you know if it is working? You must check if it meets the targets you’ve locked on during your research. Check whether it meets your expected view count and reaches your target demographics.
Knowing your campaigns’ performance is easier now with supplementary softwares like Google Analytics. Google analytics shows your graphics and data-based representation of your campaigns’ reach, engagement, and CTR. For example, the referral path in Google Analytics will help you shape more effective content in the future.
On the other hand, if you’d like to know how many people shares your content, LinkTrackr is the tool for you. Lintrackr helps you check how far your campaigns have reached and shows your sales funnel status.
If you are not familiar with how these metrics work, you may check my 9 Social Media Metrics All Marketers Should Measure. This article will show the ropes of checking analytics, especially if you plan to campaign on social media platforms.
7. Rinse And Repeat
Running a viral content or campaign can be a test of patience, with a mix of trial and error. As I’ve mentioned, this guide will set a structure in your content creation and help you get nearer to the results you want.
However, the resulting data of your successive campaigns can give you the most insight into your content’s actual workability. After all, data rules and backs any type of marketing strategy.
A failed campaign is never a loss if you know what to get from it. Treat it as a stepping stone to reach future successful attempts.
“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” as Peter Sondergaard of the Gartner Research puts it.
Create A Viral Content To Reach More Audience
Take your viral content creation into tiny bits, and don’t let producing an output daunt you. In simpler terms, focus on your audiences as they are the key to any viral content.
Serve them the pie they like, and they will be more willing to share it with an audience with similar tastes to them. Then, once you’ve done the necessary takes, you’ll soon have a self-propagating campaign.
Have I helped you with this article? Let me know through the comments. If you are new to content creation strategies and the like, you might be interested in similar articles below.
