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Viral Marketing to Pop Part Two

Feb 02

AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital 1 Comment

It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how does it work?

A viral campaign at its heart is a word of mouth campaign. (Click here for part one of this article) You create a message to advertise your product and send it out to as many people as possible. The vitality of your campaign depends on those people then forwarding your message on to others – specifically potential customers you wouldn’t reach otherwise.

To design a campaign, you first need to look at the specifics of the product you are selling, the time available to produce the message, the resources available and how best to reach your target audience (since you should always pitch to them first). Start by writing down your top-level outcomes. For most of us it would be “to interest new customers in purchasing my product” but there could be other outcomes for you as well. Perhaps your outcomes are “to get people to sign up for my mailing list” or “to announce a special sale starting soon.”

Then decide how you want to get the message out to potential customers. Videos, weblinks, comic strips, podcasts, and sound clips are all viable viral vehicles for your campaign messages. But it helps to work within a medium that you are comfortable with. Videos tend to be looked on as a universal medium for viral marketing, but if you don’t know the first thing about putting together an effective video message then you might want to start somewhere else.

Once you’ve have decided what kind of message you are going to create, you need to figure out how to present your pitch. It helps to create an outline or even a storyboard to plan out how your message is going to look, feel or even sound. Then look at the overall scope of your campaign and ask yourself:

1) Does the message make sense for the product?
The best campaigns not only make obvious connections to the product, but the campaign actually makes sense for the product being pitched. Dancing babies are great, but what do they have to do with what you are selling?

2) Is there a clear call to action?
A call to action is a specific instruction for the customer to take action after viewing the message. It can be to direct them to a sales website. It can be “come by our store today.” It should be very specific and it should match your top-level outcomes.

3) Is the message eye-catching?
This is the short-attention span generation. You need something within your message to get your audience to immediately take notice. The good news is that for viral campaigns, it’s not necessary to keep their attention for very long.

So what happens if your product isn’t glamorous, exciting or particular flashy? What happens if you don’t know the first thing about marketing? What happens if you just are not familiar with the technology to start a viral campaign? Then ask yourself:

1) Is this the type of marketing project I should be embarking on at all?
2) Should I pay someone to do the work for me?
3) Do I have the time and resources to complete the campaign myself?

My recommendation is to create a sample message – short and sweet – as a test run. For instance, create a 20-second video clip using your phone’s video recorder and post the video to YouTube. Ask your friends to watch the clip and provide some feedback. Or draw out a comic strip with your pitch and post it online. Ask people to leave comments about it.

By trying it out, you also take the process from start to finish and possibly identify some pitfalls that maybe you weren’t aware of. Here’s one that you may not have thought of: what if Facebook isn’t working the day you want to link to your campaign on the site? Technology fails all the time, websites go down, internet connections are lost. A test-run gives you the opportunity to see where things might go wrong before you spend a lot of time and energy on a large-scale campaign. I would also recommend keeping a list of all the things that may not have worked the way you expected them to so you can plan for it next time.

Finally, before you move on to a full-blown campaign, ask yourself:

1) Is it clear what I am selling?
2) Is it clear how to purchase my product?
3) Is it visually interesting?
4) Am I achieving my top-level outcomes?

If the answers are ‘no’ then tweak your campaign. Once you are comfortable with your test message, it’s time to move on to the full-length pitch.

Part three will look at how to measure the success of your viral campaign.

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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.

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