Viral marketing is changing the face of product promotion. It compels your audience to share your marketing ads with others. Viral marketing increases the reach of your product to a larger crowd and the reach grows exponentially. If you have an online ecommerce store or in a process to create an ecommerce store, start looking for ideas that can create a marketing campaign for your product which has the potential to go viral.
If you are in the initial stages, get information on how to Start an Ecommerce Store here.
The effect of a viral campaign is 500-100 times more than other forms of marketing. These figures should interesting for an ecommerce store owner. Read on to know more.
Table of Contents
1. Sharing is Marketing
Viral Marketing is all about sharing. It encourages people to share the content with their connections in order to spread the word about a certain product. There are different ways like trending hashtags, tag your friends, refer and win, strategies to make the content more attractive so that the audience is psychologically compelled to pass it on to others for their amusement or consideration.
According to statistics,
80% of online firms use viral marketing
81% of viral email recipients pass it on to at least one person.
49% send messages to two or more people.
Viral marketing works on a number of views and shares. Let us see how effective marketing manages to increase B2B Sales via Ecommerce.
B2B ecommerce platforms are gaining popularity among sellers and buyers. The most effective way to sell your products online is to market them in the most impactful manner. Viral marketing grows the campaign on its own organically and is considered to be the most powerful marketing tool of the present time.
2. Create Brand Awareness
The primary responsibility of a marketing campaign is to make the audience aware of your brand. No matter how catchy the campaign is, the purpose of marketing is defeated if we cannot achieve brand recognition from the audience related to that campaign.
People should be able to identify the brand from the ad.
Office Supply giants, Office Max, launched an online media campaign called, “Elf Yourself” in 2007. The campaign introduced an animated dancing elf and encouraged the audience to attach themselves to that dancing elf. People were asked to send their videos to others via email.
The videos turned out to be hilarious and generated a chain of emails. The campaign was very successful in terms of the number of views and shares and had every possible ingredient which we are going to discuss later in the article. But, did it make a “Brand Impact” on the audience? The answer is “No”.
While the audience enjoyed and went crazy about this campaign, there was nothing that can connect them to Office Max as a brand. By the end of creating or watching the video, nobody remembered whether it was Office Max or Staples or Office Depot? Also, the ad didn’t mention anything about office supplies.
The marketing campaign should immediately connect the audience with the product brand.
We know that selling office supplies online is a profitable niche. There is an increase in the number of sellers who want to build an ecommerce store to sell office supplies. The profits generated by this sector are attractive. But, a marketing campaign with flaws in the area of “Brand Identification” can cost time and money without generating revenues.
To learn how to Start an Office Supply Store online click here.
3. Understand Your Audience
Be clear on this point. When deciding on your target audience ask yourself why they would want to share this ad? and what will compel them to buy your product afterwards?
Targeting the right audience is half the battle won.
People who need or would like to buy your product should be the people your campaign aims for. A successful campaign makes the people share the content with their followers, friends, and family so that it hits the target audience as many times as possible.
Also, pay attention to the channel you are using. If your target audience is the one going to work and is very focussed professionally, you would like to market yourself on the sites and groups that connect professionals. You can’t be beating about the bush and trying your luck with young college students crowd.
4. Create Interest
Your content should create interest in the minds of the people to watch and more interesting to forward it. The popular ALS Ice bucket challenge 2014 gained a lot of popularity due to its interesting concept of creating awareness about Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) disease.
The campaign caught the attention of millions of people including celebrities like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, etc.
The ad resonated interest from all walks of life and had over 17 million people participating worldwide. The campaign generated $115 million in just eight weeks. Amazing, isn’t it? The campaign did its job in terms of getting viral and creating interest of the audience in the core subject related to it. Not many people knew about the ALS disease before the Ice Bucket Challenge.
5. Create Humor
Humor always finds its way into people’s hearts. You can pass on any message to your target audience in a humorous way for them to enjoy the content and share it with others.
Anything that brings a smile on the faces of the people is welcomed by all.
Create content that brings smiles to your audience and sales to your ecommerce store.
The McDonald’s and the Fries Fork ad turned out to be hilarious and went viral on the internet.
Who doesn’t want to be entertained with laughter and if it comes with the brand connect, the content successfully goes viral. People like to share what’s funny. So, if you can create ads with humor, your campaign will go viral with the audience.
6. Stand Apart
Is your content different from others? Does it have a visual appeal to stand apart? If your answer is ‘Yes’, the chances of your campaign to be successful are high. Odd one out is no more awkward. In advertising, its cool and always welcome.
You can experiment with content and create ads that are different from others. Even market leaders are facing competition in almost all fields. If you want your ecommerce store to catch the attention of your target audience, think differently.
The only flip side of such unique ideas is that sometimes in an effort to stand apart we lose the substance of the content. You cannot tell a story that doesn’t connect the people with your brand. The entire marketing effort is wasted if your audience enjoys the ad, shares it but doesn’t relate it with your product (Elf Yourself). After all, through viral marketing, the purpose is to generate sales for your ecommerce store. If that purpose is defeated, your marketing idea bombs.
7. Yes Comments
In the era of social media, you can directly interact with your customers and target audience. Keep the dialogue open. Respond to comments and interact with your followers.
Courteous communication from your side can create a good impact on your marketing campaign. The flow of comments on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter is visible to all and it shows that you are approachable and it builds trust towards your brand.
A well-known ad from Old Spice in 2010 captured a lot of audiences and has the credentials of more than 54 million views.
What made the campaign different was the response by the Old Spice man to comments in the form of youtube videos. This unique way of responding to comments on social media platforms resulted in an increase in their followers by more than 1000 per cent. Huge!!
8. Offer Incentives
Offer your customer incentives in form of discount or voucher for the next purchase to spread the ads you have created. Taglines like “Repost the video and get a coupon in your mailbox”, “Tag 10 followers to grab a discount”, “Refer a Friend” can grow your viral ad campaign exponentially.
Use Effective Ecommerce Discounting Strategies to lure your customers for making the marketing campaign viral. If the ads you have created are attractive this a way to increase your audience.
Some brands ask their customers to click a picture with the product or make a video while using it and post it on their social media account tagging your brand name. Offer them a discount on their next purchase and see the wonders this strategy can do to your marketing campaign.
Most of the time the incentive is not sizeable in its value. Still, it brings good results to the campaign. The idea here is to maximize the reach of your product. People don’t mind clicking a few more times to share the content for a small freebie that you offer.
9. Go Social
A lot of ad campaigns follow a social theme to maximize their reach and it appeals to a larger crowd.
Social messages are always recognized and they connect very well with the audience.
The famous Dove “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign showed FBI-trained sketch artist Gil Zamora creating sketches of women based on their own description and also based on a stranger’s description.
Neither did the artist looked at the physical appearances of the women nor did the women knew about this social experiment. In the end, both the sketches of the respective women were compared and it was found that the sketches as perceived by strangers were more beautiful than those described by the women themselves.
The video with the impactful message of “You are more beautiful than you think” was viewed more than 114 million times in the first month itself and was uploaded in 25 languages to reach the consumers in 110 countries. The ad appealed to the target audience to think highly of themselves and in turn, they could think highly of the brand. It is considered to be one of the most-watched online ad campaigns of 2013.
10. Access to All
The videos/ posts/ messages of your viral marketing campaign should be easily accessible and in an easy to download format. Make it convenient for the people to spread it across.
Do not ask for registration, log-in or special software to download and share. If you think this will give you information about your customers to re-target, then you are losing your focus from viral marketing to re-targeting.
Both work on different strategies and have different effects on a certain audience. Asking them about their details makes it difficult for the audience to make the campaign viral.
Viruses spread quickly just like that. If that virus is your marketing campaign try to remove all the antidotes that come in the way. Let it spread and work for the best of your interests.
Final Note
In the world of online business, it is all about marketing. Viral Marketing builds your brand in a small budget and presents it to a large crowd. Create great content and let everyone talk about your brand.
“Pure creativity takes marketing to new heights”.
So don your creative hats and look around. Find the trending hashtags, social issues, catchy lines, emotions, etc. that your brand can be related to and see your cash register ringing.
