In today’s digital era, business landscape is highly influenced by social media. If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that your audience and your present and potential clients are on social media, and that digital marketing can be a rewarding strategy. After all, more than 2.5 billion people worldwide – and this number keeps increasing – are on social networks nowadays.
Using the power of social media and building a viral marketing campaign as a powerful tool for your business is vital to creating brand awareness, increasing web traffic and opportunities to convert your visitors into clients.
With viral social media campaigns, organizations such as Facebook were able to quickly acquire new customers.
Here are 8 viral-marketing principles practiced by some of the best global brands that you can utilize in your social media campaigns:
1. Know And Focus On Your Target Audience
First of all, seek to understand your target audience. For your social media content to go viral, it needs to speak to people so compellingly that they get enthusiastic about sharing it.
Start your viral social media marketing campaign by building at least one marketing “persona”. It should characterize your target customers with their demographics, psychographics, and social media behavior and content preferences.
To accomplish this, speak with present and potential customers to understand what is important to them as they make a decision to make a purchase and share content online. This information will make it much easier for your marketing team to create content that has more chance of going viral.
2. Choose The Appropriate Platform
Next, select the social media platform on which to focus your viral marketing campaign, such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Naturally, the content you create may differ considerably depending on the platform.
3. Create Engaging Content
Most platforms use an algorithm that ranks content based on how likely users will engage – if it’s expected to engage followers, it’ll typically rank at the top of the page; if it’s expected to be less engaging, it’ll rank towards the bottom.
To reach more people and for a higher chance of re-sharing, focus your efforts on creating social media content that has high engagement.
Unique and authentic content is more likely to get engagement than content that sounds and feels like all others. Great content stands out, while content that is a result of previous campaigns will either remain unnoticed or even receive negative attention.
4. Time Social Media Content
For maximum visibility and reach and to make sure that your content performs well, time when you share it – which will depend on the patterns and preferences of your target audience, and upon the actual social media platform you’re using.
Timeliness of content release plays a crucial role in how algorithms rank content – so sharing at the optimum time can have a huge impact on how your content performs.
5. Increase Visibility With Advertising/Partnering
If you’re a small business, you know how challenging it can be to create content that goes viral on social media.
Consider investing in paid ads to increase your visibility, ensuring the ad is targeted to a group of influential users who may re-share it. This way, you will reach a broader audience in a more efficient and cost-effective way.
Also, by partnering with social media influencers who have the ability to give your brand a much better reach and ignite your viral marketing campaign, your strategy will have a higher chance of being successful.
6. Measure Performance Of Your Campaigns
Your marketing team should focus on creating content that is relevant, engaging, and timely, and use a social media analytics tool to measure performance.
By understanding what is and what is not working, you can tweak, adjust, and create better campaigns in the future. campaign.
7. Provide A Clear Call To Action
Don’t let social media engagement go to waste. Make it clear what those interested in the brand should do next, in addition to simply liking or re-sharing a piece of content. Brands like Facebook and Lyft didn’t just grow by creating brand awareness through social media; they encouraged members of the target audience to take a specific action.
In most cases, encouraging the target audience to sign up for a free trial or to make a discounted purchase are effective ways to use the power of viral marketing to grow customers.
8. Draw Media Attention
If your viral marketing campaign is performing really well, use the momentum to engage different media outlets – they love highlighting something newsworthy, and you will be able to reach even more people and strengthen your brand.
Before you reach out to a media outlet, have a press release ready with all the relevant numbers of how many people have positively reacted to your campaign and became loyal to your brand.
As a digital marketing and social media company, RODA marketing’s commitment and efforts are focused on brand consistency and generating qualified traffic via well thought out and customized campaigns that include social media management, SEO, blogging, infographics and more.
We invite you to check out our portfolio and contact us to see how together, we can take your business to higher levels of success with effective Internet marketing.