How To Go Viral – Basic Steps To Reach A Massive Audience

Having millions or even thousands of people reading your content is the dream of many marketers. However this proves to be quite difficult unless you are a famous personality or celebrity. That is why when you finally achieve that dream; you ought to take advantage of it for your content marketing and business growth.

There is actually more to be done than just making your content go viral. You need to generate conversions that come down to the sales channel and have more than just likes and shares.

You need more than just going viral and start building long-term relationships with your audience. In order to make your content go viral, you need to say what you want and say it well. Heard of the Dollar Shave Club advert on YouTube? Probably that is exactly what most marketers wish they can achieve in their campaigns. It is a single video clip, but it put the company right in front of millions of their prospects who never heard a thing about them before.

The concern with many marketers still remains why their content can’t go viral as this brand did. Well, it has been observed that such brands that have come out successful in making viral content followed a simple framework.

We’ve outlined the simple steps that you can as well follow to make your content go viral on various social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram among others.

1. Know your audience

Getting your content in front of the right audience is all that matters when it comes to content marketing. Your content therefore should be directed to a specific audience that you intend to reach out to. Knowing your target audience will help you to create a viral campaign that resonates with them. Once this is achieved, you will be surprised by how it organically starts spreading and shared by people who resonate with the content.

2. Employ powerful micro-influencers

Micro-influencer marketing is on the rise each single day, thanks to their effectiveness in ensuring the shared content goes viral. You have to keenly choose the right influencers to share your content with their followers and you can be sure it will go viral within a short period of time.

The right micro-influencers should possess a massive of quality followers who trust and respect their opinions. Reach out to your micro-influencers and tell them more about your content so that they can also start sharing if they are interested. You may as well start by sharing their content, mentioning them on your tweets, linking to their content, sending them an email appreciating their content and following them on their social media platforms to attract their attention and probably they will reach out to share your content too.

The bottom line of this however remains that you need to create a connection with the right influencers so that they can as well feel the need to share your content.

3. Make an emotional connection

Many people are compelled by emotions to take action. It is not surprising to see people do things simply because they heard, read or watched something as simple as a video clip on their phones. That is the power of creating an emotional piece that influences the behavior of your target audience. In order to master this, you will have to understand more about Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions and take it to your advantage in creating compelling and emotional content.

Many marketers have come out successful in their campaigns not only because they understood about their target audience but simply because they created an emotional connection with them.

4. Make sharing a built-in feature in your campaign

You cannot create high quality content and sit back expecting people to start sharing. Instead, you need to build sharing into your campaign. This is exactly how Dropbox’s referral program enabled them to get over 4 million users in record 15 months. Another example is Google when it launched Google+; people could only get an account through an invite only basis. In this case, interested individuals actually had to beg for invitations from people that were already registered. Many took it to social media and within a short time, Google+ was all over. They had made it and Google+ had gone viral. This is called an exclusivity technique which makes people anxious thus drawing their attention.

5. Use your audience to create user-generated content

This is a technique that takes engagement with your target audience beyond mare interactions and sharing. While tweeting out a link to the chosen demographic is essential, you need to give room for other users to tweet the content they created while promoting your campaign. This will open up your campaign to many more people who will join in if interested. Twitter marketing and other marketing techniques are quite effective in the 21^st C digital marketing.

Your content may be highly regarded but allowing user generated content to come in, takes your content marketing to the next level and agencies like ProvenSEO can you help you with it. Just think of the funny memes shared all over social media platforms and their effectiveness in making a certain brand go viral; that is exactly what we are talking about!

6. Create relevant content that can be shared

Your content needs to be useful if you really need to go viral. To stay ahead of the game with viral-content-marketing, then you have no option but to create content that is actionable and useful. The title to your content plays a great role in capturing the attention of people. This is the section that you need to work on to achieve this goal.

For instance a blog on weight loss went viral with the title, “How One Woman Lost Nearly 100 Lbs by Making Weight Loss Fun”. This blog has managed to get over 670,000 shares! The simple reason is because the headline and content are clear, direct and actionable.

7. Know the perfect moment to share your content

Choosing the right time to share your content may be crucial to ensure it goes viral. Some marketers have mastered this trick and done really well in ensuring their content goes viral. It is called the power of good timing.

To achieve this, you need to stay eyes open for the latest events and trending topics around your industry and that perfectly aligns with your brand. You may use such tools as Sprout Social to monitor trending topics on various social media platforms from a single dashboard. Such aspects will give you the energy to be creative and full of ideas of what many people will be interested about. BOOM there you have it!

In any case, you should avoid dwelling on trending issues related to tragedies and negative events and start focusing on creating entertaining content that is also humorous. In order to increase visibility, it is important to also include some images or graphics. Lastly, use of hashtags on trending topics will help a lot to get your content viral.

8. Incorporate powerful visuals

Tweets, Facebook posts and Blog posts with powerful visuals tend to go viral than plain texts. According to a study by Buzzsumo, content accompanied with powerful visuals and infographics were the most shared compared to those without. To stand out in this area, you can use such tools as Canva to create the best social media graphics.

Conclusion

Not all content created by marketers go viral. Actually, most of it doesn’t. However, taking the various strategies outlined above into consideration, you may increase the chances of your content going viral with Ning.