Viral Marketing Tools for any Business

What is your best viral marketing tactic/tool? 

 To help you with viral marketing, we asked marketing experts and business leaders this question for their best strategies. Whether it’s testing out experiential marking with QR codes or partnering with influencers, there are a number of ways to increase the chances your marketing campaign goes viral. 

 Here are 13 tactics for viral marketing:

• Win Their Hearts With Handwritten Notes 
•  Try Experiential Marketing with QR Codes 
•  Surprise & Incentivize Campaigns 
•  Make Light of the Negative Spin Zone 
•  Take Advantage of Facebook Live Events 
• Create Interesting & Newsworthy Content
• Invest in Social Media Advertising 
•  Use Pets for a Winning Strategy 
•  Drive Lead Generation with Giveaways 
•  First Reflect on What it Means to “Go Viral” 
•  Launch your Campaign on Reddit 
•  Appeal to People’s Emotions 
•  Partner with Influencers

Win Their Hearts With Handwritten Notes

 The basis of any viral campaign is customer devotion. People don’t tell their friends and family about the brands they only like. They spread word around their circles only for the brands they LOVE. As a result, anything you can do to win a favored spot in your customers’ hearts will strengthen the quality of your viral marketing efforts. 

 Handwritten notes, like customer welcome notes, thank you notes, holiday cards, and more create an instant connection with your audience. People understand that handwritten notes take time and care to produce. Therefore the messages they contain are given special consideration. With Simply Noted, you can get the viral benefits of handwritten notes without the effort. We produce automated, effective, and absolutely convincing robot-written notes that are indistinguishable from the real thing. We help build unbreakable bonds with your customers. 

 Rick Elmore, Simply Noted

Try Experiential Marketing with QR Codes

Experiential marketing or event marketing is a type of marking strategy that focuses on engaging consumers in a brand experience. The key aspect of it is that it’s based on a kind of experience and engagement, rather than on consumers passively receiving the input from a brand’s traditional type of marketing. Experiential marketing is about creating connections on a personal level with the brand. 

 In my opinion, it can be a great addition to a small business's existing marketing strategies. The idea doesn’t have to be super-produced and expensive, but it does need to be engaging and relevant. For example, give out QR-coded business cards, hats, t-shirts, mugs, or anything you can think of to help drive traffic to your brand. Depending on the target group of your business, experiential marketing can be anything from hosting an event to a promotional event of a new service. If it’s creative and engaging, it can even go viral and help you deepen your brand’s connection with the audience. 

 Joe Troyer, Digital Triggers

Surprise & Incentivize Campaigns

Viral marketing relies on referrals, so it’s imperative to incentivize customers to share announcements and brand content. When you have a marketing strategy and call to action that surprises audiences, it will boost sales. But to make something go viral, you have to inspire customers not only to purchase your products but to take the time to tell others to do the same. 

 For example, you can offer customers bonus points in your loyalty program or free shipping when they forward your emails or repost your announcements on social media. Surprising people and giving them a reason to share what they’ve seen is the foundation of viral marketing. 

 Bill Glaser, Outstanding Foods

Make Light of the Negative Spin Zone

Think about the average news feed you get. Is it predominantly positive or negative stories? As much as people love to hear about puppies being saved, the reality is that almost every news story today centers on something negative. Whether it’s crime, politics, or culture—bad stories make for good news. As a result, this is what people are mostly aware of and talking about. 

 So my best advice is to take the negative stories that are currently getting amplified, and draft off them. Put a funny spin on something that doesn’t feel good. The Oreo “dunk in the dark'' Super Bowl tweet from 2013 is the absolute perfect example of this. It was a genius play on a current eye-rolling, negative event. My point: Don’t be afraid to razz others, or poke fun at something that reactionary parties are bent out of shape over. These are always the posts that get the most shares and retweets. 

 John Ross, Test Prep Insight

Take Advantage of Facebook Live Events

One of our favorite marketing strategies is targeting live streams on Facebook of local business conferences or industry seminars, especially if you offer a product or service related to any online events in your area or niche. You can use the Facebook Live Events parameter to connect with people planning such events. For example, you could promote your business to people who will be live-streaming their wedding in three months or all concerts in your area that will be streamed live over the next year. 

 Brenton Thomas, Twibi Digital Marketing Agency

Create Interesting & Newsworthy Content

Your content needs to be really good if you want it to have a chance of going viral. We’re not just talking “decent” or “pretty good”—your content needs to be truly exceptional. After all, there’s an endless amount of content being produced and published online every day, so you need to make sure yours stands out from the rest. 

 Your best bet is to create content that is newsworthy, thought-provoking, or simply entertaining. Remember, people are more likely to share something that makes them feel an emotion—whether it be happiness, sadness, anger, or anything in between. So, aim to evoke some kind of emotion in your audience with your content. 

 Danielle Bedford, Coople

Invest in Social Media Advertising

Ads are everywhere, no matter if it’s Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. While an email marketing campaign can target only a number of people on the list, ads target the one that has never even heard of your brand. Every minute, thousands of videos are getting uploaded on YouTube and Instagram, and in between, if your ad gets shown only in a quarter of them, it will still make it trend tremendously. 

 Investing in ads is a guaranteed solution to get viral one way or another. And even if it doesn't reach a person in one go, it will eventually reach them after they see a few more videos. Influencers are earning through ads, and while they're earning, the company also is earning by getting a new target audience. Start with social media ads to get the most benefit as your target audience resides there. 

 Isaac Robertson, Total Shape

Use Pets for a Winning Strategy

Including adorable pets in a digital marketing campaign is a consistent winner. Dogs and cats are staples for producing wholesome content that anyone can enjoy. These pets can be even cuter if they are puppies or kittens, but birds and other animals can be great subjects to feature in visual posts. A great bonus is that featuring pets in a company’s marketing strategy can also be a team-building exercise as colleagues learn more about each other’s pets and families. 

 Thomas Yuan, Sanebox

Drive Lead Generation with Giveaways

Giveaways are terrific viral marketing tools for increasing your leads while extending your reach. Businesses can use giveaways as lead magnets to ask followers to exchange contact information for gifts, trips, or prizes. 

 Ask your audience to follow, like, tag friends, and sign up for your email list to participate in a giveaway-style contest that leverages attractive prizes in return for dramatic lead generation. After the giveaway, design an email campaign that targets these new leads with discounts, perks, or other benefits to persuade new users to convert to your brand. 

 Kevin Miller, kevinmiller.com

First Reflect on What it Means to “Go Viral”

With two viral videos recently reaching over 2 million views combined, I have learned some tactics to help your content explode overnight. Before you creative any content, take a moment to reflect on what 'going viral' actually means. It's a method of creating content pieces or buzzwords that are attention-grabbing and memorable. By keeping this at the forefront of your mind, you'll increase your chances of going viral from the get-go. 

 Ask these questions: Is your content attention-grabbing? Will it hook your audience within the first few seconds? Is it memorable? Is it relatable, funny, or entertaining? Once you've established whether your content piece has the potential to go viral, then you can think about how you might reach wider audiences.  

 Bethan Trueman, TEG Virtual

Launch your Campaign on Reddit

Reddit is one of the most powerful viral marketing tools available. With over 330 million active users, it offers a vast audience for your content. And because Reddit is organized into communities (known as "subreddits"), you can target your content to a specific niche. 

 For example, if you're promoting a new gardening product, you could post it on the /r/gardening subreddit. This ensures that your content is being seen by people who already have an interest in it, which increases the likelihood of it going viral. Reddit also has an "upvote" system, which allows popular content to rise to the top of the feed, where it's likely to be seen by even more people. This makes Reddit an essential tool for anyone looking to launch a viral marketing campaign. 

 Sher Jan, US Installment Loans

Appeal to People’s Emotions

This applies to almost all forms of marketing, but it’s essential for viral marketing. Humans are innately swayed by emotion, so creating a video that tugs on the heartstrings will increase your chances of viral success. You'll want to focus on strong emotions like love or hate, be super clever or incredibly dumb, and make something that gets people excited or drives them to anger. 

 The "Love Has No Labels" ad went viral in 2015 and still acts as a case study for viral marketers. What made this 3-minute and 20-second video so powerful? Emotion. People kept watching because they got pulled in by the overwhelming feelings of hope, love, and joy. It showed several diverse couples dancing behind an X-Ray machine and a crowd of smiling people filled with admiration watching them enjoy each other's company. A content creator should never fear being overly sentimental because sentiment is what drives people to watch, comment, and share. 

 Dustin Ray, Inc File

Partner with Influencers

If there's one thing influencers know how to do, it's go viral. If you want to take your viral marketing efforts to the next level, consider partnering with a niche micro-influencer. When you do this, their following can quickly become your following. Funny and relatable content will get shared frequently as videos that are outside-the-box and a bit wacky. 

 When selecting an influencer to work with, I look at the type of content they produce. If it's funny, helpful, informative, or all of the above, then I make it a priority to reach out to them. Their number of followers isn't as important as the rate of engagement. If an influencer has 1 million followers but only a thousand or so likes on each post, that's a red flag. Likes, comments, and shares should be proportionate to the number of followers they have. If everything checks out, then I create a contract with them, assign them a content brief, and watch them create my next viral video. 

 Jibran Qazi, MCPD

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