They say that once you go viral, you have made it. When you go viral, people will talk about you – the kind of awareness brands are striving for. This explains why so many businesses go toward viral marketing as a chance to launch themselves into social media stardom.
Marketing has drastically changed in the last couple of years. Marketers and businesses have used different channels and techniques to adapt to. And in this modern digital era, there’s a new way of marketing – the viral marketing strategy.
In this article
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is a marketing technique that uses existing social networks to promote a product or service. It is a style of promotion that depends on the audience to generate the message of the product or service. It is one of the most effective ways to increase traffic and leads – not just in your niche but also outside. It has a great impact on generating buzz for your business or brand.
Surely, you have shared a meme or two online. Who hasn’t? The way memes are made are very relatable and entertaining. The same goes for viral marketing. Customers and followers share a brand’s content because its message is entertaining or buzz-worthy.
Viral Marketing strategies to spike up traffic
All it takes is awesome content for people to voluntarily share to their accounts. People tend to share content on social media when it’s entertaining, convincing, inspiring, and educational.
If you are a brand that is striving to make those types of content, then there are strategies you can use. We have compiled different viral marketing strategies. These strategies are efficient in promoting to its target audience – and even those outside of your niche.
Media Coverage
Having your content cited as a source from high-traffic news outlets is very effective in sending huge traffic back to your site. Although, getting featured by these sites is not a walk in the park. Your content should be news-worthy to be mentioned by these authoritative sites.
You will need a material that the press will find very useful to create a piece of news about or back their stories up. And the best way to achieve that? Sharing your own data. Below are the tips you can take when planning on this kind of strategy.
- Produce a news-worthy content that press bloggers can use for their next piece.
- Make a list and identify the news sites that are writing about your niche. Include the contact details and the sites where they publish their content. This way you will know which sites to turn to and can help you publish your content.
- Get to know your target sites. This will help you create a more personalized pitch later on.
- Write a convincing and powerful pitch email and start sending them to these sites. Personalize each email that suits the receiver. This will also give you a bigger chance of getting featured.
- Monitor and keep track of your conversations with them. Build a rapport with these sites. You might not get featured now but who knows in the future, right?
Blogger Outreach
Connecting bloggers in your industry or niche have a benefit. Make use of the connection you have with these bloggers. The thing is, these bloggers are already talking to people in your niche. And these people will most likely give interest in your content.
If you want to bring your blogger outreach services to the future, then employ blogger outreach services. This type of service is not only limited to an article on the blogger’s site. You can also tap them into their email or newsletter that they send out to their subscribers regularly.
Paying for a link placement or content featured in their newsletter is usually how blogger outreach goes. Fortunately, it’s not always the case especially if a campaign is beneficial for both parties.
Social Media Outreach
Blogger and social media outreach have a similarity in the sense that both reach out to influential people in their respective industries to have their content, product, or service featured. Social media outreach is connecting with famous or influential personalities. These personalities aren’t necessarily experts in the field.
The goal is to get your content to reach more people as possible. And these influential personalities can do that with their massive following. The most important thing is to offer unique content. A content that can benefit their followers/readers. Leverage that to get them to share your content.
Reddit Promotion
Reddit is one of the most highly utilized community-based news aggregator sites. It logged 1.5 million users in May 2020 and is still growing. With that many active users monthly, businesses vie to be on Reddit’s front page. Once you make it on the front page, millions of visitors can see you.
However, getting featured on Reddit’s front page is easier said than done. But there are alternatives where you can still get traffic from the platform:
- Build a solid community. This will help your content reach other users and communities. Eventually, you make it to the front page.
- Use Reddit’s social button on your content that makes it easier for users to upvote your content.
- You can buy Reddit’s sponsored link or self-service advertising.
Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest is one of the websites where getting viral can lead to more traffic. The image-sharing platform is growing in terms of usage and sharing over the past years. If you are planning to launch a content that contains captivating design-driven images like infographics, photography, or GIFs, then Pinterest is the right platform for you.
What are the benefits of Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing has proven to be very effective and is very fast in generating traffic and leads. Its benefits are as follows:
- Exceptional reach is a guarantee. Viral content not only reaches your target audience in your industry but also outside of it.
- People share viral content to offer up entertaining or useful information to their friends and family. Thus, this type of marketing is a natural approach. The content speaks for itself.
- Low-cost with great ROI. Viral marketing’s impact expands organically, that’s why businesses don’t need to invest much in advertising their content. However, it generates a tremendous increase in traffic (ROI).
- Reduced in the advertising budget. Since viral marketing is low-cost, to begin with, businesses can cut advertising budgets. Rather, they can use the resource in other things that would greatly benefit the company.
- If your content gets viral, people will talk about your business/brand. Its impact will last for months and maybe even years. It’s a very effective way of establishing your brand.
Types of Viral Marketing campaigns
- Referral campaigns
- Contests & giveaways
- Sweepstakes & rewards
- Milestone campaigns
These are the types of viral marketing campaigns that businesses can take advantage of. Over the years, consumer behavior has evolved and so is marketing. In this article, we have listed the different viral marketing tools you can employ to help you generate leads and traffic.
Viral Marketing Tools To Generate Leads and Traffic
1. Woorise
Woorise is a platform that lets you create contests online. It also creates landing pages, polls, surveys, and forms online. The platform has tools that will grow your email list. Additionally, it increases followers, and engagement which will lead to sales.
What’s good with Woorise is that they have pre-made layouts and templates that you can use in your campaigns. You can then personalize them to complement your brand and will suit your audience.
Creating campaigns is very easy and Woorise has made it a fun process. Everything in Woorise is customizable. From the interface elements, images/videos, to the social actions, down to the design options.
Woorise is a very popular contest and giveaways platform. It also offers different campaigns with advanced features such as:
- Polls
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Feedback Forms
- Event Registration
- Online Order & Payments
- Newsletter Signup
- Application Forms
Price: starts at €30/month
2. MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey’s Facebook Comment Guards is a great tool to make your organic content viral. It is very easy to set up and you can run it fully automated on all your Facebook posts. For example, you want to promote a certain blog post. Here’s what you need to do:
- Ask a question connected to your post
- Get people to guess the answer in the comment section
- Auto-send a private response to them with your MobileMonkey chatbot through Messenger
The more people respond, the more visibility your post will get in your feed. And the best thing? You automatically capture a lead as well as the user’s data every time you get a response to your private message. Furthermore, users have now opted-in to receive promotional messages from your Messenger chatbot.
Tips:
1. Make your questions as click-bait as possible. Like “Name your favorite!” People love answering questions about themselves. Mind you, it always works!
2. When your engagement on a certain post is average to high, boost your post. This ensures that it reaches even more people and goes viral.
Price: starts at $9/month
3. AppVirality
AppVirality is a referral marketing software for mobile apps and SaaS products. The platform design helps businesses accelerate growth. By a way of creating and automating referral marketing campaigns.
This platform is ideal for e-commerce businesses. AppVirality has two products:
- Referrals for apps
- Referrals for SaaS
Essentially, businesses can create referral rewards that are fully customizable. You can also create your own referral rules. This would basically indicate how much reward they would get and how will they get it.
Price: starts at $199/month (Referrals for SaaS)
4. GrowSurf
Another referral marketing tool is GrowSurf. The platform allows you to have unlimited campaigns, collect unlimited leads, and create flexible rewards. Have fun creating refer-a-friend campaigns, viral contests, pre-launch waitlists, and leaderboards.
And that’s not all…
GrowSurf is very easy to use with a user-friendly interface that is simple for marketers. It is packed with features like email integrations, embedded forms, hosted page forms, and call-to-action buttons.
Price: starts at $89/month
5. OptinMaster
Is going after leads one tiring task? There’s a tool that would help you generate precious leads and turn them into customers. OptinMaster instantly grows your email list, generates leads, and increases sales. It uses one of the powerful conversion optimization kits.
OptinMaster promises an increase in leads, sales, and traffic on your website. All it takes is just three simple steps.
- Create a stunning campaign
Creating offers on this platform is very easy. There are built-in templates that you can use that are designed to give maximum conversions. But if you want to test your creativity, you can also start from scratch. Make use of the easy-to-use tools and voilà!
- Target and customize your campaigns through behavior automation
OptinMaster is equipped with a segmentation engine and powerful targeting that makes sure that your campaigns reach the right target audience at the right time. This is to ensure that your leads will skyrocket.
- Get stats to improve future campaigns
The success of your future campaigns relies on the stats of your existing campaigns. OptinMaster gives you the stats and data in real-time to help you improve your lead generation strategy.
Price: $29/month
6. UpViral
UpViral is known as sweepstakes, rewards, and waitlist campaign platform. The platform comes with automated trigger emails, pre-built campaign templates, unlockable milestones, and real-time fraud detection to get the participants stimulated.
UpViral has taken extra steps in creating a legitimate sweepstakes platform. All its campaigns are optimized for mobile use and it supports all languages. It also has taken extra measures with its legal and fraud detention features.
Another thing, UpViral can access sales tools that help businesses increase ROI. Also, slash down ad costs.
Tips for a successful sweepstakes
If you want to run successful sweepstakes online, you need to have an audience. Of course, you don’t expect to generate enough campaign buzz and social media sharing from just a couple of people, right?
You want to start your campaign with at least five thousand participants. You should be confident to have thousands of contacts that will join your sweepstakes. No questions asked, without even trying out your brand yet.
Price: starts at $39/month
7. Prospect.io
Prospect.io is considered to be a modern day sales automation platform. Its Chrome extension helps you find prospects from all corners of the world-wide-web. In just one click, you can immediately launch cold email campaigns – straight from your browser.
The platform understands that looking for new leads is tedious. Prospect.io takes care of that and you can focus on making sales to the prospects it generates.
Price: Pro plan starts $99/month
8. UnTorch
Another referral campaign tool from this list is UnTorch. It is equipped with a fully automated referral program for email signups.
This platform framework is very simple: people get rewards every time they share your campaigns with others. It is very effective that you can double your traffic/leads in a couple of weeks.
UnTorch doesn’t just create campaigns for the sake of it. It ensures viral campaigns so people will likely share it. You can gather as many emails as you like – there are no restrictions!
It offers a one-time annual fee per campaign that you can avail after you have tried the platform and satisfied with the service.
Price: $199/year
Conclusion
Going viral in the traditional form is very hard. But it doesn’t mean that creating content that has enough buzz to go viral isn’t feasible. A word of mouth is very effective but some tools will help you go viral faster. Good thing, you have a list of viral marketing tools at your disposal!
