Did you know that 63% of shopping transactions begin online?
With the right product marketing, it’s possible to engage prospects at every stage of their buying journey, eventually converting them from content viewers into paying customers.
So, how do you achieve this conversion? One way is by creating viral content.
Whatever your niche, viral content helps to gain awareness and exposure for your products online. You just need to know how to create content that builds online buzz. And luckily for you, this post will cover precisely that.
In this post:
- What Is Viral Content?
- Strategies to Go Viral with Your Content
- How to Amplify Your Content Virality
What Is Viral Content?
In a nutshell, viral content is any type of internet content (a post, video, Instagram story, etc) that achieves a high level of exposure and awareness on news websites, social media platforms, email newsletters, search engines, and aggregators.
A single piece of viral content can deliver hundreds of unique visitors to your site.
Bear in mind that viral content can be relatively cheap in comparison to other online marketing, especially paid ads and email marketing. This is because most of the traffic comes from social shares, resulting from the content’s high engagement.
While viral content is a relatively cheap option, it can be hard to pull off. You need to go beyond the typical content creation process to deliver something genuinely
Strategies to Go Viral with Your Content
So, what can you do to go viral? How can you create buzz around your product? Well, there are proven
Here are five strategies to get you started:
Make content relevant to your audiences’ interests
Taking the time to get to know your audience helps determine what type of content to deliver to them. More importantly, it allows you to personalize your message and identify the channels that your audience uses most. You can easily get to know your audience by:
- Reviewing your current data and analytics
- Creating buyer personas (aka fictional characters that depict your target customers)
- Conducting surveys
- Researching your competitors
- Reviewing audience comments and feedback
- Understanding where your potential buyers are coming from
The bulleted points above are critical in learning more about your target audience. Additionally, you should review previous successful campaigns for more insights into your audience. The more information you gather about your target customers, the better.
For example, take Wistia. They created their own mini TV series called Brandwagon to appeal to their ideal target audience. Not only is this a unique creative project in its own right, but it’s also directly relevant to their audience’s interests.
Participate in viral trends
You might’ve noticed that brands often participate in challenges and discussion on trending topics on social media. While regular social media users mostly do that for entertainment purposes, brands see it as an opportunity to spotlight their products or remind customers about their brand values. So jump on the bandwagon!
Take the 10 Year Challenge as an example. Social media users posted their photos to show how they changed in ten years, but H&M used this trend to bring attention to their
The success of content marketing hinges on your ability to leverage current trends. You should be able to make
Online video is the
For example, San Diego Zoo made a video with a popular audio and it got 1.2 million views:
@sandiegozoo Ever feel like you are being watched? 🦒 👁 👄 👁
Also: How to Make Money on TikTok: Guide for Business Owners
You should also consider paid distribution to make more impact with your content. For example, more than 50 million businesses are competing for attention in the news feed. Using paid advertising, which over 3 million businesses use, improves exposure for your content in such a situation.
Go for strong emotions
According to the Harvard Business Review, evoking intense emotions in your viewer can help your content go viral. Sentiment is an essential driver of viral content, particularly when the content evokes positive feelings, such as delight, joy, amusement, affection, hope, happiness, enthusiasm, etc.
Naturally, people are drawn to sentimentality. As such, your audience is more likely to pay attention to content that impacts them emotionally. Plus, they often quickly share this type of content with their friends and followers. Be sure to deliver a positive emotional experience when creating your content.
Take a stand on a controversial topic
Most brands take an impartial approach when it comes to controversial topics. However, when approached decisively, a contentious issue can give your content the virality you want. Of course, you shouldn’t make impulsive decisions on these types of complicated topics.
Nowadays, brands are increasingly taking a stand on controversial issues, thanks to social media’s influence and base of highly engaged consumers. A good example is Nike, which responded to George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 with its For Once, Just Don’t Do It campaign. The brand’s goal was to urge consumers and companies to unite against racism.
In today’s political climate, a brand needs to be clear about its target audience before taking a stand on a controversial issue. Regardless of your stance, your content should educate, inspire, entertain, and seek to inform your audience.
Get creative with comments on social media
Social media platforms and review sites offer
- Build trust
- Convert detractors into promoters
- Provide feedback
- Solve issues
- Learn from your customers
Engaging with customers can also improve your social media shares for more exposure if you write comments that are humorous or creative.
For example, Wendy’s is known not only as a
How to Amplify Your Content Virality
You’ve struggled, persevered and finally created viral content worthy of sharing, commenting, and driving customers to your website. Now what?
Use the right timing for posting
Timing is everything in content marketing — you want to get your message out at the right time to the right audience. For example, for posting on social media, you need to know when a platform has the most active users. Generally, people are most active across these platforms between 10 am and 3 pm. Knowing this will help with scheduling videos or posts on social media.
Best times to post on Facebook for consumer goods according to Sproutsocial
For most
For example, your content calendar can factor in holidays for each month to take advantage of demand on social platforms and other channels. Strive to publish your content as early as possible — while ensuring that it’s relevant and evergreen.
Promote customer sharing
Customer sharing is one of the most vital drivers of viral content. Ideally, the more your content is shared, the better. However, users need a reason to share your content, so you have to give them one. When creating your content, be sure to promote customer sharing by:
- Adding social share buttons on pages
- Using strong
call-to-actions - Appealing to their emotions and beliefs
- Incentivizing your product pages
Amazon does this by adding social share buttons to every product page. Netflix makes it easy for users to share their favorite titles on social media and
Incentivize your product pages
It takes a lot of effort to get visitors to your website with viral content, and you don’t want them to leave without taking any action. It’s time to incentivize!
Using incentives is a proven approach to boosting conversions if you want to sell products online. More importantly, customers will likely share these types of opportunities with their friends and followers.
Examples of great incentives for product pages include free shipping, a gift,
Go Viral with Quality Content
Whether you’re creating social media posts, YouTube videos, or blog posts, your content must be informative, engaging and emotive if you’re looking to go viral. Of course, it’s not as easy as just creating and publishing quality content — there’s a lot that goes into making content successful.
It’s important to produce
Stories with a plot and characters are likely to appeal to your audience — people want to read something genuinely engaging. In addition to the strategies highlighted above, you can also work with influencers and get media coverage to widen your content coverage.
Now over to you! Do you have a viral content creation strategy that’s found success?
- Content Marketing 101
- How to Promote Your Online Store With Content Marketing
- How to Write an About Us Page
- Why You Need a FAQ Page
- How to Get Started with Storytelling for Your Brand
- How to Use Viral Content to Sell Products Online
- Using the Psychology of
Decision-Making in Sales Content Optimization