What Is Viral Marketing And How Can You Benefit From It?
As a business, raising brand awareness is likely one of your top goals. Of course, every business wants to be the talk of the town, ingrained in the language of the people. For instance, Kleenex has become a ubiquitous word for tissues, and Coke has become the all-encompassing term for soda. This is probably the reason why businesses turn towards viral marketing to raise their brand’s reach and awareness.
In this article, we are talking all about viral marketing and how your business can benefit from it.
What Is Viral Marketing?
To put it simply, viral marketing is a promotion tactic in which the audience serves as the brand’s marketer and generates buzz for the brand. Social media was practically made for viral marketing. All it takes is a particularly compelling video to ‘go viral’, and even the smallest brand can suddenly find itself in the global spotlight. Most of the time, this is like striking gold for a brand, but sometimes a brand can ‘go viral’ for all the wrong reasons and suffer a PR nightmare from which it can take months or even years to recover.
Viral marketing isn’t limited to brands and products. Just as an example, consider the effect of memes going viral. Even though memes may not be associated with a particular product or service, the concept and procedure behind them going viral are the same. People share memes or other messages on their feeds because it resonates with them, and then more and more people jump on the bandwagon!
How To Harness The Power of Viral Marketing
As mentioned above, viral marketing utilizes the audience’s word-of-mouth; therefore, a company or business doesn’t have much control over it. You as a business can only control the message of your promotion, create something that may resonate with your audience, and then let the magic happen on its own.
With viewers less likely to watch a video directly put out by a brand, it’s even tougher for a company to initiate its own viral marketing campaign. However, a third-party influencer can create compelling content that is much more likely to go viral. This is the reason for the fierce competition for brand collaborations with prominent influencers who have a knack for creating videos that engage their audience and spread like wildfire from there.
Benefits Of Viral Marketing
What are the benefits of viral marketing, and why should you even consider this promotion tactic? Let’s find out!
Low Advertising Cost
Even though brands may need to give a little push to their marketing campaign in terms of paid promotion, as their audience starts liking the content, they will share it on their own, and you can significantly cut down your marketing expense. Once you reach the ‘gone viral’ mountaintop, it will be far easier for you to get your message around to a large audience in future marketing campaigns with less expense.
Fast Growth
It is rare that businesses achieve overnight success. Even when you believe someone became an overnight success, their story usually includes a decade-long struggle before they finally got noticed. However, viral marketing provides extremely fast growth because of the power of social media. Of course, achieving the viral state is very appealing to a business, but it’s also something that is equally difficult to accomplish. That being said, you don’t really need to become an overnight success with viral marketing. If you’re making consistent progress in your campaigns, you’re right on track.
Increase In Credibility
As the audience becomes your promoter, you are likely to gain credibility in the eyes of new audiences. When someone talks about a brand positively, more people are willing to give it a try. A great example here is the Dollar Shave Club. After their video went viral, many people were then willing to try the company’s razors.
Media Exposure
Even though inbound marketers don’t consider mainstream media as the most important outlet for building awareness, it still holds a lot of power with the people! When your content goes extremely viral, there’s a chance that large media outlets will cover your story, too. This, in turn, causes the smaller media outlets to share the story, and the glory continues. Just think about what a mention on ABC could do for your marketing campaign!
Fast Lead Generation
While businesses are usually concerned about the sales generated by a campaign, it is worth noting that viral marketing provides fast lead generation as well. When your content goes viral, there are a host of people it gets exposed to. Many of them will become your customers and many will keep you in mind the next time they decide to buy a similar product. The people who keep you in their preference list because of the viral content are just as important as those who immediately buy from you.
Creating Viral Content
With direct brand advertising losing trust among consumers, it’s natural to turn to a third party to give your brand the best chance of going viral. Platforms like PopTribe facilitate the connection between brands and influencers and act as the middleman to manage these relationships.
To make sure an influencer is as passionate as possible about the product they’re promoting, PopTribe allows influencers to request products from brands themselves; we don’t simply pair brands and influencers. This more organic approach makes it much more likely that a video promoting your product will go viral.
