Viral content is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days. It can be found on the forefront of a marketing campaign and it’s often shared on different social media. The big questions is, what is it all about?
When a piece of content goes viral, you can lie back with the peace of mind that your work has done the best it could ever do. It isn’t done easily though. It’s not unusual for a company to spend hour after hour trying to create a piece of content that will go viral, just for it to only get under a hundred views.
Viral marketing isn’t something to be afraid of either. You may mention that you work on viral marketing and people may take a few steps back, not wanting to catch anything. Although viral content doesn’t make people ill, it does share similarities with how viruses work – hence the expression.
A piece of viral content will spread from person to person. It may start with one person sharing it, but this sets off a chain reaction of sharing. One share turns to two, two turns to four, four goes to six, this can go on and on until the next time you check your content it has over a thousand shares.
Even a thousand shares is quite small in the terms of viral marketing. This video was made by Quiksilver and was reported that it have over 10 million page views in only the first few months of launch.
It’s easy to see that the video was staged by actors, but it didn’t stop this video from becoming a classic. You may be wondering why this video does so well, whereas your recruitment has under 10 views. It’s time to understand just exactly how we can make the most of viral marketing.
What exactly is viral content?
It has been subject to debate over the years when it comes to people deciding if a piece of content has gone viral. Some may believe it’s to do with what the content is, whereas other believe it all falls down to the overall views. A piece of content that has gone viral will cover a particular subject in a certain way, resulting in a high number of views.
As a prime example, PSY released the song ‘Gangnam Style’ back in 2012.
Whilst the song isn’t the most amazing pieces of music ever created, the unique and interesting music video propelled Gangnam style into the charts. At the time of writing this blog the music video has 2,022,480,952, and I guarantee that this view count will have increased even more by the time you have read this sentence.
It isn’t just video content that can go viral. Threshers is a wine and spirit retailer. Back in 2006, right near christmas time, a voucher was leaked that allowed people to get 40% off wine and champagne off the Threshers website. The voucher was released under the story that it was intended for only suppliers, and it had been leaked accidently.
Threshers claimed to be worried about how much money they would make as they had no intention for the voucher to get in the hands of ordinary people. Little did people realise that all of this was a fad. Because people were so amazed that they were getting 40% off, the news got spread in news articles, emails and even through word of mouth.
It’s reported that Thresher received a 60% sales surge thanks to these vouchers. By making people believe that they were getting a brilliant deal whilst Threshers still made money, this marketing went viral, all with very little effort required.
What categories should a piece of viral content cover?
When you come to writing a piece of content, it’s important to figure out exactly how you can make a piece of content viral. Generally, there are six specific categories that can be included in a piece of viral content, although only one can do the job:
- Secrets
- Unique
- Funny
- Shocking
- Strange
- Taboo
All of these can work together to create a piece of memorable content that a person isn’t likely to forget, making them share it through different ways, reaching a wider audience.
Secrets
This may seem a tough category to understand, but trust me, secret content has produced some of the most amazing marketing campaigns that have ever existed. One of the prime example of this is Alternative Reality Games, often known as ARG.
An ARG combines viral marketing with user participation. A person will follow clues that may require them to check out fake websites, phone numbers and sometimes even real objects that have been hidden around the world, all to promote a certain product.
Nine Inch Nails is a band that has only one person who produces the albums, Trent Reznor. He released an album entitled Year Zero, but before it was released it had an ARG that had over 17 websites devoted to it.
It first started when a Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt had a phrase on the back which said, “iamtryingtobelieve”. This was a URL for a website that talked about a drug which was apparently an immune system booster which had been distributed by the U.S water system. Are you still with me? Because things are about to get a whole lot weirder.
A fan was at a Nine Inch Nails concert in Portugal when he needed the toilet. When he went into a bathroom stall he found a USB drive that had a song from the unreleased album. Inside of the song file was a link that led to another website. It had people talking about underground resistance, strange government drugs and sightings of a hand in the sky.
If that wasn’t bizarre enough, if you ran the last few seconds of that song through a spectrogram you got this image:
This went on and on with different websites. During Nine Inch Nails concerts, people started to find strange fliers, lithographs and more bathroom USB drives. On one drive you were given a phone number which if called, let you listen to a wiretapped conversation.
Fans began to get invited to secret meetings where they were given pre-paid phones. Those with phones were summoned to a secret meeting which turned out to be a live Nine Inch Nails concert. Half way through the concert, a SWAT team busted in and shut the whole thing down.
It was then that the game was explained with a final website that explained the plot, showing how it was all a game. The whole information about this ARG are explained in this Wikipedia article.
I thought i’d showcase this in detail as it’s an amazing example of how creating a secret can lead to an amazing release of a product, especially if you have got the whole community working together.
Unique
Content that is unique can often be one of the hardest things to produce. It has to be something that is completely extraordinary when compared to other pieces of content. It requires a lot of creativity and execution, which can very easily be messed up.
When producing a piece of content, you should stop to think about how it will effect your target audience. Will it add value to the readers day? Will they be thinking of it as time goes on? If you manage to follow these two questions then you can be sure that your content will become a lot more shareable.
Unique content doesn’t have to focus on something that goes on in a persons personal life. There’s so much more that you could cover, such as unique events that have happened over the years. Making sure that the writing is of a high quality while focusing on the uniqueness of a certain situation, it can be easy to make something that is shared a lot.
Funny
You have to be very careful if you try and create content that has a focus on being funny. What you find hilarious may not be appealing at all for someone else. Generally, if you’re trying to convey a funny time it will be more effective when mixed with another category.
For year after year comedians have made a living by mixing both humour and taboo subjects. Be very careful though. Offending people may not be the best way to keep good relationships with people.
Just try and make sure that it flows well, rather than coming off as being forced. By doing that you can make a piece of content that will be a genuine joy to read.
Shocking
Don’t think that making a piece of content that is shocking means that you’ll be offending a person’s morals. It can mean that you leave a reader actually thinking, “Wow, what is going on”. When I wrote about Nine Inch Nails I chose that as it was an event that genuinely had me shocked at what was going on.
More often than not, you can use shockingness to provoke excitement in a person. “Wow, they’re actually doing this!”. If a person feels excitement when reading a piece of content they’re more likely to tell another person about what is they have read.
When being shocking try your best to make sure you don’t talk about a topic that’s too controversial. If a person is offended by your work then it isn’t likely that you’ll be too popular in the future.
Remarkable
Creating a piece of content that’s remarkable is a great way to make sure that your content gets widely recognised. This can range from the actual to content to the way that it’s exactly set out.
Something to bare in mind is that remarkable doesn’t have to be completely unique. You just need to make sure that it deviates from the norm enough to leave a lasting impression. Don’t get me wrong, unique content is always better than something that has been ripped off someone else.
If you make a piece of content that is truly remarkable, you should get a response similar to “have you heard about…”. It’s something that will spark conversation, or even make the reader have to take a double take. By doing this it’s more likely that they’ll want to discuss it with another person for their opinion.
Taboo
A lot of people get confused when it comes to the actual definition of taboo. In simple, it’s a subject that is labeled as being improper or unacceptable. A piece of content that talks about something that no one else will dare is definitely going to catch the eye of someone else.
If you want to talk about taboo subjects, it serves to be very sensitive about what you’re speaking about. You don’t want to offend people, as that would be detrimental to your business. Instead, talking about a subject that isn’t normally covered is going to be more popular.
Religion and money are both taboo subjects that can be a go to subject. They can be controversial subjects that people don’t mind speaking about a lot of the time. A person is either going to skirt around it or be fully immersed in the subject.
Taboo subjects are definitely one of the hardest subjects to implement effectively, although if you can pull it off, you’ll see the shares rolling in.
Closing thoughts
Without even a second thought it’s easy to see that viral content can be incredibly effective for any marketing campaign. I could have written a whole blog about different viral marketing campaigns over the years (I better write that one down), and just how effective they have been.
Thanks to the ever rising trend in social media and video marketing, there’s always a way to create a piece of content that can take off and become viral. You really do have a blank canvas to work with, so it’s definitely something to consider in your next marketing meeting.
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