What makes a marketing campaign ‘go viral’?

Unfortunately there’s no one tried and tested way to get a campaign to go viral. It’s more of an art than a science but there are a few things that viral campaigns have in common that you can try to recreate in your marketing activities.

A multi-channel assault

Videos are often credited as being the type of content that goes viral but actually these videos are usually accompanied by all sorts of other marketing activity too. Consider text marketing from GlobalMessaging along with social media, email campaigns and maybe even print advertising too. Just take a look at O2’s Be More Dog campaign, you can easily see that this is more than just a few adverts and online videos.

Make people feel good

If we take a look at the Ice Bucket Challenge from 2014, it’s easy to see how making someone feel good is a recipe for success. In posting their own ice bucket videos, people all over the world were feeling good for spreading awareness and donating money to charity.

The same goes for the #nomakeupselfie campaign that Cancer Research UK adopted as its own. These are both good examples of campaigns that have gone viral and raised a huge amount for charity too.

Evoke an emotional response

You’ll need to do this quickly in order to keep a viewer’s (or reader’s) attention. Keep your branding to a minimum and focus on how your content makes someone feel.

Generally, positive emotions get the best results but negative emotions can work too when paired with anticipation and surprise. Strong feelings of amazement and curiosity are important in viral content but you also need something people can relate to.

Your brand will need to be tied into this in some way so a good place to start is to think about the emotions your brand evokes. Once you’ve identified these emotions, you can start to think about the kind of content that you can tie this to.

Make it shareable

Content goes viral because someone shares it, then five of their friends share it and so on until it’s spreading across the web like a virus (hence, the term viral content).

This is going to be much easier for people if you include easy ways to share the content. These could be simple sharing icons or even a call to action that asks people to share.

The easier you make it for someone to share your content, the more likely it is to happen. Internet users are inherently lazy and very few people will spend time copying and pasting links into their social clients to share a video with their friends. Make it as simple as the click of one button.

Keep it simple

Don’t over-complicate your content. You’re more likely to get a result if you keep your message simple and to-the-point. This will ensure your content appeals to a wide range of people too.

Thinking carefully about your content can give it more chances to go viral but sometimes it’s more about being in the right place at the right time.