Have you ever heard of viral marketing? It’s the marketing that spreads like wildfire. 🔥

Viral marketing is an effective way to get many people to engage with your brand. 🧑‍💼

I will show you some of the best examples of viral marketing that impacted brand value globally.

Read my blog to learn more about this marketing technique, including viral marketing examples, and how it can help you to reach your goals. 👇

What is Viral Marketing?

I think we’ve all heard of the phrase “Ideas spread like viruses” and this is quite true. Nowadays, in this era of technology, the process has sped up much faster than what it was a decade ago.

We have so many sophisticated channels and mediums these days that if we want to spread any form of content or ideas; it can be done quite effectively and quickly. This is where viral marketing has taken its place.

Viral marketing is a business strategy that mainly uses social networks to promote the brand through various content. The purpose of viral marketing is to spread information or any commercial message through the users themselves.

The users themselves act as the medium through which the intended information is spread. The main idea here is that it inspires users to spread or share content with other users. They choose to share themselves. We will explain how that works in this chapter.

How Viral Marketing Campaign Works?

The basis of a viral marketing campaign is to give the right message to the right audience at the right time. Carrying out a viral marketing campaign is quite simpler than other forms of marketing campaigns. This method is used by all types of businesses – both small and large.

However, this works best for new startup businesses and smaller businesses who are trying to gain exposure in the industry. That’s because, through viral marketing, it’s really easy to gain popularity within a short span of time. Moreover, it’s cheaper than the generic traditional marketing methods, so it makes it cost-effective.

The important thing to realize is whether or not the content you are publishing will go viral or not. If you are only trying to create content for the purpose of making it viral, then make sure to follow the elements that make something go viral.

• Create your content (video/image etc.)
• Put it on the internet in (any platform)
• Do something that’ll at least gain some attention initially. For example, boosting
• Wait for the users to share it like crazy!

This sums up the whole process. In some cases, things get viral by accident. For example, a video or any other form of content might suddenly become very popular without the uploaders realizing it.

Sometimes brands use this as a strategy to circulate their content around the internet. They fake the viral, they make it seem like they uploaded something by accident which got sudden popularity among internet users but in reality, they purposely spread the content themselves.

The idea that something that should not be in public gets public fascinates internet users and that’s why it gains more popularity. Day after day, brands are using this to spread their brand awareness to a wide range of users.

What Makes It Go Viral?

Unless it’s something controversial, the guarantee that your content will go viral is not 100%. However, there are certain elements you can add to your content that will push your content toward getting viral. These elements are quite effective.

1. Easy Access: The content that you are trying to make viral should have accessibility to everyone. It should be free for everyone. This ensures that your content will at least reach a wide range of users of the internet. Easy accessibility also gains more attention from users globally.

2. Transferability: The content or the message that the content is trying to convey should be capable of being transferred easily. If it’s a teaser video, it must contain links that the users must click on to avail of the original video. Even apart from this, the content should be easily transferable from one device to another via E-mail, WhatsApp, and Messenger, etc.

3. Attention Grabber: The most important aspect is the content itself. The content should be engaging enough to be an attention grabber. The message you are trying to portray through the content should be easy to understand.

It can’t be very long content. Moreover, the messages inside the content should be placed intelligently where it is most engaging. Users must be able to identify the message they are trying to convey.

4. Celebrity Endorsement: This is a very effective yet not available to everyone technique that can make your content go viral. If any celebrity or any influential person shares or reviews your content on their social media or any other platform; the chances of getting that content viral become very high.

Advantages of Viral Marketing

1. Low Cost: Most of the work here is done by the users. They share your content, they like it, they post comments on it, etc. The unnecessary cost to spend money on further advertisement gets cut down. The only cost is the money spent on making the content.

2. Massive Reach: The fluctuating element of viral marketing is that you never know how many users it will reach. It does not have a fixed target audience. Viral content tends to reach an audience outside of its horizon. Without spending any money, your content can reach lots of people

3. Builds your brand: When content coming from your brand gets viral, the perception of the audience on your brand gradually changes, either for good or bad.  However, you have the right to choose which content should get viral.

So generally it’s for the good. It helps to create brand awareness and gains new followers along the way. The growth rate is fast and helps to generate leads very quickly.

4. High user engagement: The decision to share and review the viral content completely depends on the user. So, it doesn’t feel invasive, like the brand is not forcing or persuading the user to share the content. The user is doing it because the content is interesting. As a result, user engagement is very high.

5. Fast Growth: Viral Marketing is a smart throwing arrow. If you can grab the audience’s attention with just one piece of content, your company’s growth will change overnight. Whatever your product is. If your content can touch the heart of the audience. Your brand value will increase along with your sales rate and the valuation of your company as well.

6. Customer Trust: Gaining customer trust in business is very difficult. But once your company goes viral for some reason, you won’t have to wait long to gain customer trust.

6 Best Inspiring Viral Marketing Examples 👇

1. Dove: In 2014, a Dove advertisement went viral. The ad touched the audience so emotionally that the video got 144 million views in just one month. Actually, this campaign was called Real Beauty Sketch Campaign. The story of the video was that an artist was drawing two sketches of some women. One is about how they see themselves. Another sketch was about how other people see them. Only 2 percent of women considered themselves beautiful. The message of this ad was basically to trust your own confidant. The video received a good response from the audience due to the emotional touch on the subject. This video is one of the top three globally shared videos.

2. Zoom: Zoom did this campaign during the corona pandemic and it went viral.

This competition was about to encourage those who are doing remote jobs from home. They can create and share various images and videos using zoom’s virtual background feature.

Zoom awarded 3 winners every month. Due to such viral campaigns, Zoom commercially benefits greatly. 50,000 new users signed up on Zoom just to participate in the competition.

3. ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: Everyone who is reading this blog must know about this viral campaign. It was in 2014 when the challenge was started on the internet. The goal was to raise awareness and raise funds for those suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (AlS) disease.

The challenge was about- filming yourself having a bucket of ice water poured over your head and then nominating three more people to do the same. And if the person you nominated will failed to do so in 24 hours they have to comply or donate money to the cause.

You will be surprised to know that, In just under a year, the Ice Bucket challenge raised over $11.4 million, more than 10x raised in 2013.

Even Bill Gates accepts Mark Zuckerberg’s ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and nominates Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest and Chris Anderson from TED to participate and raise awareness for ALS.

Let’s see the 50 best celebrity ALS Ice Bucket Challenges that are the most famous viral marketing examples.

4. Uber’s Launch Campaign: Many of us know that Uber was launched through a viral campaign. A Southwest Festival was held in Austin, Texas. Uber offered free rides to the guests who came to join the conference and festival. After the Event, Uber got quite a response on social media. Many people were talking about this service of Uber. Targeting the customer is most important in branding. Uber targeted the young people who came to the festival and they used social media to promote Uber on social media.

5. IHOP or IHOb: In 2018 IHop with a simple tweet ihop gained the attention of their audience. They announced that they are going to change their brand name to IHOb from IHOP. The new announcement made a huge controversy on the internet. For the next 7 days, the whole world started guessing the meaning of the “b”. And then finally they released that “b” stands for “Burger”. This controversy brought $113 million in burger sales. This viral campaign was controversial at the time. There is no doubt that it was a successful viral content.

6. Dollar Shave Club: Most of the time audience prefers to appreciate content those are humourous. Dollar shave made a funny video with some catchy dialogue. It was really fun to watch the video. This video only cost $4500 to make. But the audience response brought 12000 new orders for Dollar shave Club.

Conclusion

Viral marketing is an effective and cost-efficient way of spreading the word about your brand and engaging with wider audiences. I have discussed in my blog what is viral marketing and how it works.

I have shown you some of the best viral marketing examples, How they grabbed audience attention and increased their demand on the market. By understanding the core principles of viral marketing, you can create content that is entertaining and shareable, which is more likely to be seen and shared by more people. With the right strategy, viral marketing can be a powerful tool for you to reach and engage more customers.