7 Guidelines How to Get Your Campaign Viral With Word of Mouth on Steroids

Viral Campaign

Viral marketing is the in-thing today when it comes to online advertising. In simple terms, this is marketing through word-of-mouth on steroids. Instead of you spending a massive amount of money for newspaper ads, TV commercials, banners, and marketing campaigns, you let your viewers do the work for you by distributing your advertisement! Suddenly, your campaign takes a life of its own, quickly and effectively spreading like a virus. Your ad piques interest and everyone who knows about will want to see it. If they appreciate it, they will share it to others.

Viral marketing is extremely powerful, providing your campaign with a huge punch than that of regular advertisements.

But how do you do effective viral marketing? Here are a few useful guidelines.

1. The most effective advertisements and campaigns strike on human emotion. Making your audience feel something is the key to the viral effect. You want people to be filled with emotions of love and hate, be joyful or angry, to laugh or to cry, to become a genius or an idiot, or to feel sympathetic or insensitive. In other words, you want people to have their blood pumping with excitement.

 

Do not aim to be neutral, to please everyone, or to target select groups. Viral marketing is purely all about emotions.

2. If you want your audience to notice your campaign, you need to do something different. That makes your advertisement stand out. In other words, do something unexpected. Remember that tuna advertisement where a man attacks a bear instead of the other way around? That was one of the most effective viral advertisements every created because it showed something that the audience never expected.

3. The worst mistake that you can do is when you treat your viral marketing campaigns as just another advertisement that people share. That is what traditional marketing is all about—hard selling your product, giving it center stage, showing people how good it is. This may or may affect your audience’s buying attitude.

Viral marketing, on the other hand, is about telling a good story. When Sony promoted their Bravia TV, they produced an ad that thousands of colored balls rolling down the street. They did not even feature the product in the advertisement! But it was a huge success—everyone remembers it.

Thus, forget about promoting your products—everyone does that. Forget about trying to make it the best—everyone does that too. Instead, strive to create a captivating story.

4. Your campaign stirred the hearts of people all around the world. Everyone regards it as interesting and captivating. Emotions reached to new heights. You have their complete attention. But that momentum will fade away if you do not follow it up. Thus, give them more—sequels. These could be:

  • Extra movies similar in concept to your successful ad
  • A continuation of your campaign
  • A behind-the-scenes look
  • A set of bloopers
  • Freebies
  • Blogs

Avoid leaving people with nothing.

5. How can your content spread if you do not share it? Allow downloading, sharing, and embedding your content. Remember that sharing is the engine that makes the engine of viral marketing go.

6. Do not restrict access so your campaign can launch and spread on its own. Thus, do not require people to register, become exclusive members, download software to run the campaign, enter unlock codes, or pay a fee. Exclusivity is a huge obstacle in viral marketing.

7. Finally, connect with your audience. You captured their attention, and they are very excited to talk about it. Thus, reply to their comments, tweets, and reactions.

Keep in mind that effective viral marketing campaigns hit people’s emotions. Thus do not be alarmed if there are some people out there will post angry remarks about your campaign. You will just have to accept both positive and negative comments and opinions about each other.

Good luck in your viral marketing endeavor.