The goal of viral marketing is to have customers and prospects share your content on the Internet. This approach is appealing because customers and prospects giving you a “thumbs up” through sharing is more persuasive than you simply telling them how great your products and services are.
The big challenge with viral marketing is content overload. How will your message be heard above the noise on social media, blogs and elsewhere online? Avoiding these seven mistakes is a big part of the answer to that question.
7 Common Viral Marketing Mistakes
1. Automatically Avoiding Overly Promotional Content
Conventional wisdom holds that viral content — blog posts, social media shares, video, memes, etc. – won’t be shared if it’s overly self-promotional. But this is not necessarily true. Think about Super Bowl ads. People share them left and right if they are funny, if they are unique or if they carry a powerful message about a social issue.
If you have advertising content with one or more of those attributes, people may indeed share it. However, don’t overestimate your creative skill. Instead, test your ad on a small control group, perhaps on just one of your social media accounts, to see just how sharable it is.
2. No Connection Between Your Message and Your Business
Viral content won’t help your brand, generate inquiries or produce online orders if it is irrelevant to your business. For instance, publishing a controversial blog post about a hot political topic might be tempting, since things like that attract a lot of attention, comments and shares. However, if you’re in, say, the plumbing business, political commentary is not going to establish your skill and reliability one bit, and worse, it may alienate a segment of your prospects.
3. Overemphasizing Creativity
Having a wildly creative message does indeed generate shares, but being genuinely creative is hard, and most businesses have non-creative messages that are easier to produce and more likely to attract shares that count. Let’s go back to the plumbing business. Customers and prospects will eat up short videos about how to fix a leaky faucet, how to replace a toilet, etc. Value, not creativity, is what makes most viral campaigns successful.
4. Not Looking Beyond Brand Awareness
Justifying a viral marketing campaign by saying it will help brand awareness is easy but incomplete. Now there’s nothing wrong with brand awareness, especially if you have a small company or are a start-up.
But why not add other goals? For instance, product-themed content should have a conversion goal as well as a brand awareness goal. If you create a tremendously useful how-to blog post about one of your products, why not have a link in that post to a landing page on your website specifically designed to sell that product? Getting 500 shares is terrific. Getting 500 shares that produce 50 orders is game-changing.
5. Not Sharing Systematically
Viral marketing is much more than putting a piece of content out there and crossing your fingers. Content must be shared and reshared systematically, on all your online channels. For instance, sharing content once on your Twitter account may or may not generate shares, simply due to bad timing. For real results, share that content once a day for a week, and then once a month for a year (or on whatever schedule makes sense).
Your social media platforms may have different standards for what constitutes too much sharing, so be careful not to overdo. A bit of trial-and-error may be necessary to find the right sharing schedule for each platform, but once you do, you’ll have an organized, scalable viral marketing campaign.
6. Not Connecting with Your Sharers
When somebody shares your content on Twitter, thank them. When somebody comments on your blog post, respond. When somebody clicks through on your email blast, let them know you appreciate their interest with a follow-up email. Respond quickly, too. When people are freshly engaged, they are most receptive to starting a business relationship or taking it to the next level.
And by the way, embrace those negative comments! A negative comment gives you an opportunity to apologize, set the record straight, express understanding, or do whatever the appropriate, responsible and professional response might be. Others will see how well you handle the negative situation, and that content may itself go viral with a strong, positive impact on your brand.
7. Not Having an Adequate Budget
Creating a steady stream of sharable content comes at a cost. The work requires talented writers, photographers, web designers, videographers, editors and content marketers. Research is necessary to identify promising, relevant topics. Time is required to monitor shares and respond (see point 6 above).
Make sure your budget aligns with your goals and the amount of content you plan to produce. One-off viral marketing accomplishes little. But a steady, sustained effort gathers momentum as the months and years pass. Better to start slowly with a campaign you can afford and keep at it for a year before passing judgment.
Related: The Ultimate Guide to FOMO Marketing
