Viral Marketing: Marketing Tactics For Viral Success

September 26, 2018By: Cydney HatchMarketing

Going viral: The unrealistic expectation every business aspires to as everyone wants to be a quick overnight success. As a marketer, your main goal is to share your brand but viral marketing is easier said than done.

Chances are that most of your material, even if it’s marketing gold, doesn’t make it big, but why?

You eat your veggies…

You call your grandma every week…

You got a degree in marketing…

You work hard…

…WHY?!

Many people think viral marketing requires big money, lots of time for stellar content and needs lots of luck. As a marketer myself, I can say it’s not 100% luck but more so the right balance of right place, right content, right time.

Although I do not have the code to business virality, there are techniques and tactics you can use to improve the likelihood of success and maximizing your results. These techniques don’t require lots of time, large budgets and they most definitely do not rely on luck.

In this article, we will talk about the difference between viral and buzz marketing but will also share viral marketing techniques that will help you to drive more traffic and sales.

What is Viral Marketing? How is Buzz Marketing Different?

You might be wondering, “Aren’t they the same thing?”

Well, not exactly.

There are terms frequently used in marketing: word of mouth marketing (WOM), buzz marketing and viral marketing. Although a lot of these are used interchangeably, they are fundamentally different. So, to draw the lines and clearly define them, let’s take a look at the difference between the three before we dive into the details of viral marketing.

Word of Mouth (WOM)

When you think of word of mouth, you want to think of organic reach.

WOM marketing is when a consumer’s interest for a company’s product or service is reflected in their daily conversations. Since the goal of every marketer is to start a conversation about their business, it’s an easy one to recognize.

For example, have you ever gone out with friends where they ask you for a suggested business, service or product? If you recommend a business, service or product that you love, you’ve just done WOM marketing for that business. They then might take that information and continue a chain reaction by suggesting it to others and so on and so forth.

This is also easily done over the internet now with people suggesting and reviewing on platforms like Amazon to even sharing products on their friend’s social media feeds.

Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing takes WOM marketing to the next level. With buzz marketing, businesses try to wow, shock or excite conversation about their business. Buzz marketing is all about getting people talking, not just waiting for people to suggest your business.

Buzz marketing can work with any and all types of marketing, including content marketing, guerrilla marketing, and social media marketing. An amazing example of this comes from my roots of living in Virginia. Busch Gardens hit the marketing goldmine with a buzz marketing effort that went wrong but then went so so good.

Busch Gardens introduced its new roller coaster, Apollo’s Chariot. The concept of the ride came from mythology, so to introduce it the park they brought in the closest thing to a Greek god— Fabio. He was to take the first ride on Apollo’s Chariot—front row center, surrounded by ladies dressed as Greek goddesses (quite the visual, am I right?).

Although this alone would have been enough for a “buzz,” but something went wrong. A goose flew into the path of the speeding coaster car, leaving Fabio with a nasty cut across his nose.

The story, which started out as a simple promotional photo op, suddenly turned into a headline craze. The park got tons of free publicity and people were talking about this freak accident (I mean, who wouldn’t want to ride the coaster that took out Fabio?!).

Imagine, if this happened in the age of social media, how much more coverage would it have received?

Like this example, buzz marketing goes beyond building brand awareness and relationships, it’s also a great way to spotlight your business in impactful short-term spurts (no animals or models need to be harmed in the process, though).

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a little bit different. Viral marketing is reserved for content that spreads like wildfire across the internet. The goal is to get a marketing message out and enable people to send something along to everyone they know. It is in some ways a mix of WOM and buzz marketing set for digital platforms.

For example, Melbourne Australia’s Metro put out a fantastic viral video: “Dumb Ways to Die” that was also paired with a free mobile game.

The campaign centered around a melodic music video featuring “monsters” who die in comically brutal, unintelligent ways, before finally highlighting that due to train predictability, accidental death with trains is quite possibly the dumbest way of all.

Something as boring as public transit was made viral all due to catchy jingles, cute graphics and violence: perfect stuff for catching people’s attention. In fact, the results were amazing:

• This video sits at 170,775,325 views since its posting in 2012.
• The game became No. 1 free app in 21 countries including USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany and it reached top 100 in 101 countries, top 1,000 in 148 countries.
• In six weeks, DWTD gathered an estimated $60 million in earned media.

It was a genius plan to entertain, inform and strategically continue to evolve across different platforms.

Virality at its finest!

Whether it’s products like fidget spinners, ASL bucket challenges or dumb ways to die, there are many factors that went into these campaigns to make them a viral success.

In this next section, let’s talk about viral marketing techniques that will help you to drive more traffic and sales just like these examples.

Key Viral Marketing Techniques

For viral marketing to work, you need to get people talking about you. And, to get people talking about you, you need to give them something they’ll be excited to talk about.

Now, before we get into key viral marketing techniques, it’s fair to say that some viral marketing techniques might work better than others, especially depending on your business vertical.

Choosing the right appeals and the right strategies will be an important first step, but you can also use other tactics to improve the likelihood of success. A viral marketing strategy need not contain all these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be.

Target, Target, Target

The first step to developing a viral marketing campaign is to find out who your targeted audience is and where they live online. Nothing goes viral on its own, you need to send the right message to the right people.

The channel is equally important because if you are marketing in a wrong channel then you won’t be able to reach your target audience. If you can’t reach the targeted audience, you won’t be able to grow the interest.

Since viral marketing is closely tired to social media, look at what content performs the best by monitoring these social media analytics:

• Audience Engagements
• Trending Topics
• Keyword Traffic
• Page Impressions
• Clicks and Reaches
• Demographics

Each of these above will give you insight into top performers on your social media pages. From there, you will know what to do.

Don’t Be a Fence Sitter

Viral marketing is all about evoking action. As a marketer, you need to accept that you will not be everything to everyone so forget trying to please everyone. Take a stand!

Develop an option and inspire strong emotions to be felt through videos, blog posts, ad copy or social content. You want people to either love or hate you. You want extremes most of the time as that ignites passionate conversations, thoughts and feelings people want to share. I mean, just take a look at the uproar the Nike commercials made with Kaepernick:

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