Are you the responsible one for coming out with the creative side of your company’s marketing? If so then this is a post for you. I’m referring more here to those of you who are working within your company’s marketing section rather than those of you who are actively working for a digital marketing company, but if even if you are CMO at a marketing agency then maybe you can get some inspiration from this. 

Viral marketing is the toughest nut to crack in marketing, principally because most viral videos seemingly have no rhyme or reason as to why they have lifted off in the way that they have done. Whilst I do concede that there are many videos of that nature, which don’t have a clear route to going viral, many of them do have hidden signs which we can find and then utilize on our future marketing projects. 

Success vs Investment 

It is easy to fall into the tried and tested method that investment equals success, after all we have based pretty much all of our advertising on that for countless years now. The social media platforms however are bucking the trend and we are seeing videos get millions of impressions which have had nothing more than a couple of bucks spent on them. I must stress that you will still need to spend in order to create good content, not spending big doesn’t mean you should penny pinch and forego content quality. The key here is not assuming that a big investment will get you a viral vid. 

No Timeline 

It would be easy to think that you can just whip something up and then it will have an instant splash, but sadly when it comes to viral videos there really is no telling when they are going to blow up. This is where you have to get smart when you think about your topics and which you may be touching on, let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you have created a video ad for some potato chips, in December, and you theme it around football and friends. Now this may be aimed at the xmas market, Boxing Day football matches etc. but there is also a big chance that come Super Bowl season, that ad gets dug out again and goes viral mode. This is what we are now dealing with, an ad has a far bigger lifespan than ever before. 

Views vs Popularity 

This is a strange one to get your head around but basically there is far less correlation between number of views and the level to which a vid goes viral. Naturally there will be a big amount of views, but the impact of a viral vid goes much further than that. Simply knowing about a particular video is enough for some people and many of them will gladly talk about it without even having seen it. 

Viral is different and it is important that we understand those differences in order to make a success of your vids.