Viral advertising is one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to reach your target market. And as your advertising message is spread by your customers/fans/supporters it’s much more targeted than traditional advertising and much more believable. First, people will only tell those who they think will be interested and second, most people are likely to believe what their trusted friends tell them about a product in preference to the world of advertising.
At present these are several different techniques that you can use to make your promotion efforts go viral. Videos, online games, pictures, website applications, ebooks, articles are just some of the online vehicles that you can use to expose people to your product or brand without using traditional advertisements.
However, if you want to make the most of the viral potential of the internet there are three vital steps to follow;
1. The Correct Approach
The main purpose should be to engage your audience by arousing their emotions. Forget about creating material that you think will interest your target market. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. However, you can polarize opinions all of the time.
So when you create your viral advertising material, try to whip up feelings of love, hate, agreement, disagreement etc. People won’t respond to anything that they feel neutral towards. Why should they? There are so many things competing for their attention these days. You must create something that commands their attention to such a degree that they feel compelled to share it with someone else.
If you leave them thinking, “Wow, that’s brilliant, so funny/unique/inventive/cool” etc or “I totally disagree. I’m so angry, how could anyone have the nerve to create that?” they will be much more inclined to pass the information on to people they know in order to obtain their opinion.
2. The followup
Once you’ve gained the attention of your target market, it’s absolutely vital to provide them with an easy way to pass on your content to other people. So make sure that the content is somewhere online that they can provide links to, allow them to embed your content on their own site or on one of the social networking sites etc. Make it easy for them or they won’t bother.
3. The Mistakes To Avoid
The final issue to bear in mind is accessibility. If you want your content to spread virally, it must be easy to find and easy to access.
If you make your content hard to find, or construct barriers around it, such as making people register to access your site, enter access codes or download software it won’t become viral, regardless of how unique, brilliant or controversial it is. Would YouTube have grown as quickly (or at all) if users had to register before they could watch the videos on offer?
The other fatal mistake to avoid is one which big corporations make on a regular basis. Too many marketing executives are so wrapped up in the greatness of their company/product/service that they focus on it to the exclusion of everything else in their viral advertising content. But people are selfish, they don’t want to be sold to and they don’t want to waste their time watching/listening/reading about the quality of a company or its services. They want something that’s genuinely interesting, entertaining, informative or through provoking.
So it’s no surprise to learn that the most effective viral advertising campaigns are those where the main product/service is incidental to the main story contained in the viral content. The narrative focuses on entertaining/surprising/informing the viewers rather than blatantly selling the product/service.
In conclusion, if you want your next viral advertising campaign to grab the attention of your target market, make sure that it arouses emotion, is eay to access, easy to spread and delivers your message as a secondary element of the main story contained in the vital advertising content.
Tags: Viral Advertising
