What is viral marketing?

The Ice Bucket Challenge raised $220 million for ALS organizations in 2014. Wendy’s tweets ‘roasting’ other brands have earned millions of likes and shares since 2017. And every year, millions of users share Spotify’s personalized ‘Wrapped’ graphics to social media. 

These campaigns amounted to millions of dollars of free advertising, via a method called ‘viral marketing.’ Viral marketing can be a powerful, cost-effective way to increase brand awareness and customer engagement. And while going viral is often unpredictable, as a business owner, you can increase your chances of success by crafting a viral marketing campaign using the tips below.

What is viral marketing in business?

Viral marketing is a marketing tactic that leverages online social networks and word-of-mouth to encourage the organic, exponential sharing of brand materials, such as articles, images, memes, or videos. It’s a low-cost, highly scalable form of marketing, as social media posts are easy to share and have few geographic or social barriers, allowing your content to quickly find diverse, untapped customer segments.

Because this strategy relies on organic sharing, your business’s viral success can appear more authentic and spontaneous to customers than other campaign types, such as out-of-home ads or guerilla marketing. The tradeoff is that virality is also inherently unpredictable: Many campaigns designed to go viral fail, while others succeed unexpectedly.

You can use viral marketing to launch a product, reignite interest in an existing product, or simply promote your brand, but every viral marketing campaign strategy has two main goals:

1. Increase your chances of viral success by maximizing your influence
2. Prepare for viral success with consistent content 

How do viral marketing campaigns work?

Successful viral marketing campaigns maximize influence by sharing emotionally resonant content with an optimal starting group, called a seed set. Using your social media analytics tools, choose a seed set whose engagement will maximize the reach of your ads—this includes influencers, but also any user who engages with posts and has a lot of followers.

If your seed set shares your posts enough times within a short time frame, your campaign reaches its breakout threshold, after which enough users are sharing your posts that they will continue to spread without your input. This is what we mean when something “goes viral.”

If your posts spread too quickly, however, your campaign will surpass its capacity threshold, after which you’ll soon run out of people who want to share it, and your campaign will be over before it’s had a chance to leave a lasting impression. You’ll want to create a campaign that stays in between these threshold values for long enough to have an impact.

What types of content go viral?

Viral marketing requires content that inspires viewers to share it. People may interact with a social media post because it provides useful information or because it emotionally resonates. Most viral content is a combination of both, but the latter is more complex to implement.

To inspire emotional reactions, create narrative-driven visual content that integrates your brand and features bold colors and (where appropriate) expressive human faces in videos or loops. These narratives can communicate something about the brand or the customer. If the latter, consider using your customer data to create personalized content, or invite your customers to share their own content under a theme.

Focus on eliciting strong positive emotions like awe, belonging, laughing, nostalgia, or pleasant surprise. (If you’re asking customers to create their own content, you can also leverage positive peer pressure.) Negative emotions can also drive virality, but it’s often short-lived—your campaign will cross its capacity threshold and burn out, while your business will continue to be associated with bad feelings.

The pros and cons of your business going viral

Once a marketing campaign goes viral, it’s no longer mostly in your control, and sometimes, the campaign will produce different results from what you intended. This can have positive or negative consequences depending on how you’ve established your viral marketing strategy.

Advantages of viral marketing campaigns

• Low-cost exponential growth. Social media marketing has a low barrier to entry for businesses, and sharing content is so easy that the right seed set can kick off explosive growth. Users sharing branded materials with each other will increase conversions and promote your brand at no cost to you. 
• Reach unreachable customers. Once your campaign goes viral, your marketing will organically reach new segments and markets who otherwise wouldn’t respond to your targeted marketing.

What can go wrong when your business goes viral

• Negative word-of-mouth or backlash. If your campaign triggers negative emotions, it could cause lasting damage to your brand. Monitor negative sentiment toward your viral marketing, and update the campaign or address the response if necessary.
• Overwhelming your business. If you run a small business or brick-and-mortar store, going viral can invite more customers than you’re equipped to handle. This can strain your staff, customer experience, or local infrastructure.

5 tips for a successful viral marketing campaign

Going viral is a matter of chance, but you can increase the odds of a successful, sustainable campaign by adhering to the following tips.

1. Post consistently

Consistent posts make it more likely one of them will be propelled by social media algorithms toward segments outside your seed set. Consider each of your posts an extension of your viral marketing strategy, as one viral post will bring people to the rest of your feed.

2. Consider the context your posts will be seen in

Make each post an expression of your brand voice that’s likely to be seen in a positive light, regardless of the global and personal conditions of your audience.

3. Find the right seed set

Align your seeding strategy with the goals of your campaign. For example, if your goal is to increase awareness versus conversions, you can use social media analytics tools to identify people who are well-connected to and have influence over many people in your target segment.

4. Tailor your content to each platform

Adjust your content to the digital context in which customers will see it. People tend to use Facebook and Instagram for short-form videos and social connection, Twitter/X to follow personalities, TikTok to watch short-form video entertainment, and LinkedIn for professional networking. 

5. Create ads that are unlike anything else

The most surefire way to stand out is by creating a unique ad. Consider what your competition is doing, and look for industry white space you can claim for yourself.