Going Viral

Principles of Viral Marketing

 In digital marketing, we want our blog articles to be read, we like to receive comments. We want our Email marketing to be engaging. Something that goes “viral” means it proliferated and gets shared many times over. This is most prevalent on Facebook and YouTube. Viral marketing in the mobile era is often boosted by smart video content.

 Viral digital marketing is a design principle, and implementing design principles has to be carefully planned and implemented across the board. What does this mean? It means having a “share” or “invite” or “Email to a friend” option is not enough.

Customer acquisition costs are real, and finding the omni-channel solution to lowering these costs is a key strategy to optimizing your ROI. But wait a second, viral marketing can also boost retention and boost lifetime customer value.

 Suggestions: 

Loyalty Programs

• Create time-limited coupon offer, card points system, loyalty programs, app with leaderboard, or other time-limited free offers that create urgency
• Share them on social media and your Newsletter
• Make sure your ESP has ‘social share, social link and Email to a friend options

Contests

• Create video contests and product review contests with good prizes and share them on social channels where video is prominent
• Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, among others….

Foster User Generated Content Environments

• Reward social media participation of customers and especially user-generated content that is useful.
• Engaging your brand advocates and influencers on ideas for branding and viral campaigns (think of them as your affiliates in the “field”).

Piggy-Back Influencers

• Identify and build partnerships with customer influencers who may become brand advocates among their peer groups
• Referral bonuses can work great in some industries. Refer a friend and get a discount on your next purchase, for instance.
• Segmental your viral campaign by your customer personas and target them on the channels they use.

Hire for Video Content Skills

• Hire marketing people who like to work with video and have a stage presence and proven ability to video-edit, video-blog and entertain.
• Create a partnership with a popular “online” personality; this could be an up and coming artist, or a video tube channel that gets a lot of views. Why not use mega-influencers.
• Sponsor used created contests and pay particular attention to anything that stimulates interactivity, animated infographics and boosts your unique selling points.
• Invite popular and talented guest bloggers in your field to post on your blog.
• Use video testimonials of products to boost credibility, interest and trust-worthiness.

Cultivate a Brand Image that Cares

• Leverage your company’s charity activates and create your own #hashtag on twitter for the occasion.
• Know your audience, viral campaigns to Millennials for example, must be on the channels they inhabit.
• Create content that specifically relates to how nice a company you are and the perks of working there. Increasing social capital is good business.

 

Viral Marketing is Engineered

Think of viral marketing as the social ripple effect of well through out gamification layers and digital publicity campaign content with smart social networking. Just being on social media and expecting organic growth to happen is not enough. Viral marketing has to have fresh, dynamic and ideally, a video interface component. VUIM (video user interface marketing).

Viral content is an experience essentially, worthy of sharing.

What’s new and interactive on your website? How can you feature it? Does it entertain? How is it shareable to create a viral effect? 

Lead with your Unique Sales Proposition

Which of the products or services your company offers has the most potential to go viral? How can you market it in the most favourable light? Identify which of your company’s offering have the highest viral potential and the most inherent virality. Remember we share, what is emotionally engaging, even if it is another silly cat video.

You will notice, some topics simply do get more likes, shares, comments and engaged feedback. What are they with respect to what your company does?

Power of Email Forwarding

Litmus recently pointed out that because trust and action go hand in hand and because social channels are saturated with too large follow lists, inbox referrals tend to perform better than social media referrals. This makes sense.

 

Forwarding behaviour has shown that:

 

• Social sharing excels at expanding reach
• Email forwards excels at driving additional conversions

 

This is logical since Email referrals may be more authentic, judged as being more credible and probably more targeted (less random).

 

Benchmarks for Email virality vary, but a 0.27% forward-to-open rate is decent. That’s more Email forwarding than you might have expected and that’s good news for viral campaigns done via Email marketing. An average email campaign could be expected to get 1 forward, for every 370 opens. Litmus knows its stuff.

 

Pyramid of Subscriber Needs

 

For those Maslow lovers out there, you will like this:

 

Level 4: Forwarding – Social Shares = Remarkable

Level 3: Conversions = Valuable

Level 2: Clicks = Functional

Level 1: Opens = Respectful

 

A “channel-actualized” Email will therefore show it’s full power only when it goes “viral”. So what’s required?

 

Level 1: Requires:

1. Permission
2. Opportunity
3. Initiative
4. Expectation

 

Leading to more opens.

 

Level 2: Requires:

1. Mobile design
2. Images / text / links /logo + CTA – design
3. Quality assurance
4. Segmentation testing
5. Time of day/week testing

 

Leading to more clicks.

 

Level 3: Requires:

 

1. Analytics
2. Personalization
3. Automation
4. Autosenders – Triggered Messages
5. Predictive analytics
6. Live content

 

Leading to more conversions.

 

Level 4: Requires:

 

1. Exceptional deals
2. Gamification layer offerings
3. User-generated content
4. Unique Sales proposition leveraging
5. Significant acts of Corporate Altruism & Community Engagement

 

Leading to more forwards + social shares. = Virtal coefficient

Summary & Ideology 

The golden rule of content marketing is that remarkable content will get shared; it’s really that simple. However to create a viral campaign, strategy and luck helps. Good branding helps, and so do the core services and products that makes your company great.

Are you tapping into the full potential of Email forwarding and viral marketing as a design principle in your omni-channel approach?