Viral Marketing is a strategy where a unique content spreads exponentially online, because the content is appreciated, shared and liked immensely. This is a great way to brand and drive traffic to your website. The content can take any format, all you need is to use your creativity. Once youve created great content that customers want to engage with then the real challenge is to distribute it to the right audiences. And the Data from your Viral Marketing campaigns must be analyzed to measure and control your results.
Challenges you face in Social Media Marketing
64 percent of content marketers feel they dont use content effectively. Some of them are focusing on quality while others are primarily focused on quantity. Neither approach guarantees results. However, the end goal is the same: publishing great content that gets shared on social media and ranks high in the search engines.The amount of content being published online is growing exponentially and content marketers are partially to blame.
In June 2000, there were fewer than eight million websites. Today that number is greater than 750 million, according to Netcraft.com, and shows no signs of slowing down. This means that it will be harder and harder for you to cut through the noise in order to get your content read. Great content goes unread everyday on the Internet. Google is essentially telling you to publish as much content as possible, however this approach hides the real problemlack of a distribution strategy.
Promoting your Message
Rather than trying to produce more or better content, you should focus on your distribution. However, its likely just an afterthought for most of the 64 percent of marketers who feel theyre not using their content effectively. Here are a few findings to get you into the right direction:
- You can actually step down content production and step up distribution to get better results
- An ecosystem of vendors have cropped up to help you drive distribution of branded content
- The most effective promotions often come from doubling-down on past successes
- Better distribution improves contents quality, as the feedback cycle accelerates
Distribution needs to broaden your reach and improve your recommendations. To achieve that, you will need people to share your content. Lets take a look at how to do that now.
How to get People to Share your Content
- Make it easy for people to share your content – Any more than 2 to 3 clicks of a button, and its too much work to share your content. One simple example of making content easy to share is tweetables
- Ask them to share it – Dont make people remember that they could share your content, either remind them with a call to action. Tweets that ask people to retweet them get 51 percent more retweets than tweets that never ask
- Use images – Tweets with images are 94 percent more likely to be shared, and photos on Facebook get 53 percent more likes. 93 percent of the 5,000 most shared posts on Facebook last spring were photos. Only 3 percent were status updates
- Create round-ups as blog posts or other content – Round-ups are a content format. You ask a number of experts one question, then round up all their answers in a blog post. Round-ups can also be SlideShares or audio recordings, but most of the time theyre blog posts
- Write listicles – Listicles are articles based on lists. This post is a hybrid listicle. Some people look down on listicles as being too formulaic. But for better or worse, listicles get shared more than almost any other format
- Write strong headlines – Many authors publish on how to write better headlines. Its worth a read if you want to write better headlines. Your headline largely determines whether or not your article gets shared. 80 percent of people will never read beyond your headline
It isn’t easy to create viral marketing promotions. If you’re looking for a silver-bullet viral marketing solution, feel free to get in contact.
Viral Marketing – From Self Promotion to Advocacy
With purchase decisions vastly influenced by mentions and recommendations, smart marketers transition their initiatives from self promotion to advocacy. This 10 minute video shows how buzz is actually stimulating those mentions and recommendations helping businesses increasing market traction.
Data Analytics to Control your Viral Marketing Results
After the Viral Marketing campaign has finished, you may ask yourself if it has been effective. Measuring the success of any Viral Marketing campaign can often be subjective. To really determine whether or not the campaign has been successful, you need to decide whether or not its achieved the primary aims that were part of your strategy. Benchmark the campaigns success against questions like:
- Has this content generated a substantial amount of links, shares and brand mentions?
- Have I seen an increasing conversion rate since the launch of this campaign?
- Has there been a significant increase in brand exposure both online and offline?
Industry standard Predictive Analytics tools will help you track valuable results throughout the entire duration of your Viral Marketing campaign. Interpreting the raw analytics data will also help you pinpoint moments of success and failure.
If you’re looking for a silver-bullet viral marketing plus predictive analytics solution, feel free to get in contact.
As a Marketer, how do you grow your Pipeline when using Social Media to Spread the Word?
Feel free to share your ideas in the comments and share this post with friends in your network.
