Social Media Promotion

How to Make Your Content Go Viral

CopyPress

April 14, 2020 (Updated: February 9, 2023)

In this article…

• What Does It Mean to Go Viral? 
• How to Go Viral

Building awareness of your brand and product is an effective way for consumers to discover your company and learn more about your product. Many companies accomplish this by making their content go viral. This leads to an increase of viewership, more traffic on your website, and more inquiries about your product. Learn more about viral content and read these steps to understand how to go viral.

What Does It Mean to Go Viral?

Your content goes viral when large numbers of people like, comment, and share your campaigns or marketing material in a short amount of time. Receiving numerous shares and interactions on your pieces allows more people to view it, which builds strong awareness of your brand. When you create more awareness, consumers become more familiar with your company.

Once a consumer sees your viral video, blog post, or graphic, this may intrigue them to learn more about your company and product. It can cause them to visit your website, research you online, or read more of your marketing material to gauge an understanding of your business and what you offer. After learning more about your business, they may want to contact your company for a demonstration of your product or they may try to purchase it.

How to Go Viral

Making your content become viral takes strategy and research to build campaigns geared toward the right people. Follow these steps to learn how to make your content go viral:

1. Learn and Understand Who Your Target Audience Is

Before you can create pieces effective enough to become viral, you must first understand who you’re marketing to. Your target audience is the key demographic of who regularly buys your product. There are many instances where you have more than one target audience. For example, if your company sells baby formula, one of your target audiences can be women ages 25 to 40 with a newborn child. Another target audience can be men ages 25 to 40 with newborn babies.

Since they are the ones who regularly purchase your product, you want to create content catered directly toward them. This can be information related to your product or videos and graphics educating consumers on the product or industry information.

By building a target audience and creating buyer personas for each of them, you can learn what type of content each audience member reads or views and what outlet they regularly consume it on. This helps ensure they will receive your content and find it useful, relevant, and valuable. Once you learn the type of content that connects with your target audience and where you can effectively reach them, you can build campaigns that have the potential to become viral and significant.

2. Research Other Viral Brands for Different Ideas

As you strategize ways to go viral, research other content to help you gain new, unique ideas of your own. Look at other websites or marketing material made by your competitors or other businesses in your industry. You should also research products that have the same audience or demographic as you. Learn what content is attention-grabbing and try to find patterns within popular pieces of content. Keep these in mind as you create your own material.

Even though you’re using what you’ve gathered from other business’ material, try to develop your own campaigns that are different from what your audience usually sees. You can take small pieces or themes of other marketing campaigns and use it to generate a whole new idea of your own. For example, if you notice a majority of viral content consists of personality quizzes, create a one-of-a-kind quiz that focuses on your business and is entertaining for your audience to engage in.

3. Learn What Your Audience Currently Likes About Your Content

Before you make new content, find your current material and review its data and analytics. This helps you know which pieces content users currently read or view. You can also understand what they like about the material you create. For example, if you track the clicks, views, and shares of all your marketing material and learn that your videos have the most engagement and interaction, you can focus on making a viral video.

Reviewing your contents’ analytics helps you gain an idea of what you’re doing right and what you can improve on. You can take this newfound knowledge and put it toward the current campaigns and material you’re building.

4. Review Various Trends and Current Events

Getting your content out at the right time is an effective way to increase your chances of going viral. Research different events approaching and brainstorm relevant posts about it that are entertaining for consumers to view. This provides your audience with a sense of relevancy and relatability. You can research various pop culture events and center content on that.

You can also review different social media outlets to learn what relevant events or trends are taking place or what people are currently talking about. You can gain ideas from this and build campaigns that reference a popular current event or trend happening. This can entertain your audience and make them excited to see a brand they enjoy engage in various trends. This may cause them to share your content with their friends, family, and other members of their social network.

5. Build Emotional Connections With Your Audience

Marketing campaigns that tell the story of your brand while also making consumers feel emotionally connected with you is a great way to lead them to share your content. You can write emotional copy that makes your audience feel nostalgic and happy, or you can create videos that trigger your audiences’ emotions and drives them to take action.

For example, food banks may share holiday campaigns that focus on families or children who wish for home-cooked meals over the holidays. Sharing a heartfelt video or blog post sharing the personal story of this family can make the audience feel emotionally connected and cause them to donate or share this story with others. Creating emotionally driven material allows you to connect with your audience and build lasting relationships with them.

6. Make Your Content Easy to Share

The main way content becomes viral is by creating material that consumers can easily share. When you make pieces like blog posts, white papers, eBooks, infographics, and videos, encourage people to share this with their friends or family. You can do this by placing a share button within your content pieces. The share button you place should encourage them to share it on their social media.

Giving them the option to share can make them more likely to spread the information you’ve provided in your material with others. This is a way for you to give them the idea to share your content. Placing a share button makes it simple for them to quickly spread the informational or entertaining piece you created. You can also give them the option to share their own message along with the content. This allows them to promote your product or brand, while still making it personal for them.

For example, you could write a blog post mentioning childhood memories. At the end of the article, you can encourage readers to share the post with a message about their own childhood memories. This gets your brand out for others to see and gets readers excited to share something personal about themselves.

Image via Flickr by wocintechchat.com

7. Write Content That Brings Value to Readers

Many companies go viral by writing informational content for readers that is simple, relevant and easy to consume. Writing copy that provides teaches the reader something can allow them to share it to provide others with knowledge as well. You should learn more about your target audience to gain an understanding of what topics they search for online. Build valuable content that increases their knowledge of certain subjects and makes them enthusiastic about sharing with others.

Use keyword research and data from search engines to discover what you’re target audience is hoping to learn more about. Writing consistent content like this can help establish yourself as an industry leader. Provide your audience with well-researched pieces like blog posts, white papers or infographics that they will want to share with others.

8. Support Your Content With Visuals

75% of posts shared on social media are either images or feature copy with supporting images. Photos are a great way to capture the attention of your audience and make them want to read your content. Images can also help your audience better understand and remember what they are reading about. When you share a piece of content on your social media pages, try to find a picture relevant to the copy you’re writing about and share that alongside it.

Another great way to support the copy you’ve crafted is to put any research you’ve conducted and data you’ve gathered into an infographic. This is an effective way to share factual information that makes it educational and engaging for your audience. Infographics contain images that accompany each statistic to make it easier to understand and quicker for the reader to digest.

9. Collaborate With Influencers to Promote Your Product

Influencers are people who have many followers on various social media outlets. Once they have gained a strong platform, they may collaborate with different companies relevant to their content. They will then create posts that promote this business’ product. You can research influencers who may use products similar to your brand or who may benefit from using your product.

For example, if your business sells cooking utensils, you can find an influencer who creates cooking videos. You can work with them to brainstorm campaigns that both promote your product and entertain viewers. Collaborating with influencers can help you gain a larger audience which boosts your awareness. This can cause the posts you create together to go viral.

10. Create Entertaining Videos

Videos are a great way to get your content noticed. Once you research your audience and understand how they like to consume their content, you can learn if videos are the best tool to grab their attention and entertain them. You can create informational videos that teach them about your product and answers common questions they may have.

The videos you create can be animations, step by step tutorials, or demonstrations of your product. Videos are also a great way to put a face to your brand. Each video you create can feature different employees from your company to help personalize your business and allow your potential and current customers to get to know your company.

This is a great way to build trust and relationships with your audience. Your employees may also enjoy the opportunity to engage with your audience and teach them more about themselves, the company, or the product.

You can release separate videos that have a completely different piece of informational content in them each time or you can make a series of videos that all blend together. Consistently releasing a series of videos is a great way to make your content go viral. This encourages your audience to stay tuned to view more of the ongoing videos you create for them.

As you release each piece of content, measure performance to learn what customers like about each campaign. It may take you a while to craft content that goes viral, so you should understand that it takes time and dedication. Testing each campaign you publish can help you better understand what you’re doing well. You can apply similar methods to future campaigns and refrain from repeating strategies that didn’t supply you with many audience engagements or interactions.

By remaining patient and committed to supplying relevant, entertaining and engaging content, you can build campaigns that reach large audiences over time. This can eventually lead you to promote content that goes viral and captures the attention of many viewers and readers.

CopyPress

April 14, 2020 (Updated: February 9, 2023)