Avoiding Potential Downsides To Viral Marketing
Blog
Aug 28
For marketers, achieving the status of a household name almost overnight is the ultimate dream. Imagine launching a campaign so captivating and effective that it becomes part of everyday conversation. What could be more exciting?
Plenty of businesses have found sustainable success using a viral moment as a launching point. However, a few precautions are worth considering before leaping into the intensely competitive race to produce the next viral campaign.
What Going Viral Means
In the early days of social media, “going viral” was all about content—mainly videos and memes—that spread like wildfire. These viral moments were marked by their genuine, unscripted nature, untouched by the hands of marketing teams or approval from boardrooms. It was this raw authenticity that fueled their exponential growth and captured the public’s imagination.
The power of capturing an online audience in seconds has cemented viral marketing as an essential tool for brands looking to boost visibility. While our tactics have evolved since the days before smartphones, the core principles remain unchanged. Viral content must be engaging, accessible, and, above all, authentic in the eyes of the viewer.
Is Going Viral Always a Good Thing?
Contrary to the popular saying, there is such a thing as bad publicity — at least when it comes to viral marketing.
The quickest way things can go wrong here is through inauthentic, heavy-handed, or tone-deaf branding. You don’t generally want ads to go viral for the wrong reasons (like appropriating social justice causes to sell Pepsi). When an ad goes viral for reasons outside the bounds of your brand’s core image or values, it fails to generate qualified new customer leads (hurting ROI) and polarizes the brand’s existing base of customers (damaging retention).
Patching up a brand’s damaged reputation after it publicly misjudges its audience’s sensibilities is no easy task. True, the virality of the moment may reach the eyes and ears of a broader audience — and there’s something to be said for controversy working in an established brand’s favor on occasion — but brands choosing this road still risk each of the following downsides:
-Irreversible distortion of your main message
-Reaching unintended, unqualified audiences
-Generating temporary buzz leading to audience burnout
-Backlash and reputation damage
-Loss of brand identity and authenticity
Quick Tips for Better Viral Content
Even in cases where a campaign catches on as intended, those millions of views need to turn into paying customers eventually for the campaign to have any lasting impact. Here are the three foundational principles of any successful viral ad.
1. Embody your target audience’s values. The industry calls this “brand alignment” in reference to a target audience’s values being accurately reflected in their preferred brands’ products and messaging. Viral viewership is a tempting target to pursue, but even the most loyal and engaged communities can fizzle out if your brand demonstrates inconsistency in its core principles.
2. Choose quality over quantity. Not every piece of marketing content needs to be built with virality in mind. Quality content that provides real value by emphasizing unique innovation, design, features, and a stellar user experience — and which presents those values in a creative and interesting way — will always win out in the end.
3. Engage with your audience authentically. Viral content is shared person-to-person, the very definition of organic growth. It doesn’t take an expensive full-length ad to create meaningful engagement; user-generated content, behind-the-scenes looks, influencer collaborations, and even responses to user comments on social platforms can launch a brand into the spotlight.
As long as social platforms continue to serve as today’s public forums where audiences meet and interact with brands online, viral marketing is likely here to stay — as are the prerequisites for pulling it off successfully. The next great viral campaign reassures loyal customers, prioritizes quality content over erratic trend-hopping, and engages authentically with users in a variety of ways.Then, craft content that matches the platform’s preferences to maximize your reach.
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