Tips for a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign

Online marketing is far outstrips even the most powerful of traditional advertising mediums. Through online marketing, you can connect with people around the globe, without the incredible expense that comes with TV, radio and print advertising.

One of the most popular and powerful options in online advertising is viral marketing. How do you create a viral marketing campaign? What should you know? What are the various viral marketing techniques that you will need to employ? Here, you will learn more about what you need to set up a successful Internet viral marketing program.

Connect, Connect, Connect…

No, this does not refer to getting online through your ISP. Rather, it refers to connecting with surfers. In order to have a successful viral marketing campaign, you must connect with your readers on an intrinsic level. You have to make them feel something – preferably something beneficial in regards to your company, product or service.

Viral Marketing Campaign

Make them happy, make them hate, make them feel compassion, or make them excited. Neutrality is the bane of viral marketing success – go for extremes and you will have better results.

Avoid the Expected

Is your product great? Is it really cool? Is it the best thing since sliced bread? That’s wonderful – so is everyone else’s product. You need to break out of the mold.

Don’t promote your product as being “perfect” or “innovative.” Use unique methods of advertising – evoke humor, horror, suspense – almost anything can help your audience connect with your product, so long as it is unexpected.

In addition, if you can achieve this, then you have a far greater chance that your message will go viral, with your readers, watchers or listeners doing your marketing for you.

It’s All about the Audience

The first, and most essential, thing to remember about creating a viral campaign is that it’s really not about you. The campaign is not about your company and it’s really not about your product, either. It’s all about your audience. Therefore, if you want to have a successful viral marketing campaign, you need to make your advertisements about your audience.

Create an interesting, compelling story. While your product might feature in the story, the story should stand alone if your product were replaced with another one, or eliminated entirely.

Sony and BMW are both solid examples of creating viral marketing campaigns that engaged their audiences, even without featuring a product (in the case of Sony).

Give Your Audience the Needed Tools

Viral marketing campaigns are all about sharing. You want and need your audience to download, embed and share your ads. However, for them to do this, you have to give them the tools to do so…

• Give your audience the tools needed to share on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• Give them the tools needed to embed your ads in their blogs or in their emails.
• Give them the ability to “thumb it up” on StumbleUpon or to tweet about it on Twitter.

When you give your audience the required tools, your viral marketing campaign will be much more successful than otherwise.

In short, engage, captivate, astound, astonish and let your audience share your ads. Viral marketing campaign success rests on your ability to forget about yourself and your product. It’s all about your audience!