The process of making a branded video to go viral requires more than trial and error. It involves having a video marketing strategy based on timing, building of an audience, engagement, and distribution. Here are 5 essential steps to boost your viral video marketing strategy:
1. Going beyond traditional marketing
Viral video marketing goes beyond making interesting or funny videos. Going beyond traditional marketing involves creativity and imagination. Some of the brands that have done this include Samsung with their LED lights ad. They strapped the lights onto sheep and used them to create works of art. This ad has over 19 million views.Another way to do this would be involving real people to react to situations that are imagined. TNT’s ad, 'push to add drama' used this technique. It has over 15 million views on You Tube. They created a scene with a button named 'push to add drama'. When real people would push the button, more scary things would happen. The drama was staged on a Belgium street and real people reacted by pressing the button and when things turned awry, they reacted. Ultimately, their reactions were filmed, and they were pleased to see themselves in the drama.
Another company, BlendTec has used this technique in a very captivating way. They began a 'Will it Blend?' campaign and they have used their blenders to blend all sorts of things. They have used Apple products, popular video games, DVDs of Justin Bieber, and even paintballs. By using already popular products, they arouse the viewer’s curiosity, and the videos go viral. The viewer is left to wonder why the product needed to be blended. The point is home: the strength of the blenders.
2. Seeding the initial views
There is a sort of catch 22 here. For your video to get shared, you need an audience. Simultaneously, you need people to share your video to gain an audience. This means that as you launch your video, you must have a video marketing strategy to seed the initial views.Seeding is a marketing term that means distributing your video to various appropriate channels, for instance, forums, Facebook pages, blogs, and twitter conversations. The bottom line is to ensure that all across the channels, you are guided by your audience demographics.
Another aspect of seeding is to use tools that help boost your views, or ask people on your mailing list to watch the video at a specific time when it launches. Some tools will help expose your videos to large audiences on blogs, mobile apps and social games. Initial promotion for the first 48 hours after the launch gets you on the 'Most Viewed List'. This way, there will be very many people who will want to watch the video as they will gauge it based on other people’s trust. If others have watched it, it must be good. One of the dimensions of a viral video is a huge number of views.
3. Being Simultaneous
One of the best ways to boost your viral video marketing strategy is to be simultaneous. There are 2 facets to this. The first is releasing many videos at the same time. This way, when a viewer gets captured by the first, they will want to watch more videos, which you will avail for them. If they can watch even 5 videos, getting them to visit your site will be effortless. If you upload the videos one by one, there is a very high likelihood that they will never get to watch the other videos or even convert, which is what every video marketing strategy aims at.Releasing multiple videos at the same time means that they all have the same opportunity to get to the most viewed page. To ensure that each video gets a chance to get to the most viewed page, you can delete the second video and re-upload it after 48 hours. This is just a smart video marketing strategy to increase your chances of getting to this most coveted You Tube page. This way, you need not market each video separately.
4. Strategic tagging
Tagging is a very basic video marketing strategy. However, strategic planning adds another dimension to it that many marketers are yet to utilize. Viral videos do use tags, which are keywords that help your video to show up on searches in search engines. Strategic tagging involves controlling the tags that are associated with your videos.To do this, look for very unique tags and use them on your videos. Unique tags are those that have not been used much by other videos on You Tube. This way, you gain control over the videos that show up as 'related videos'. Your viewers get to actually see related videos that have to do with your brand. This is because if you allow You Tube to rank 'related videos', they may not be related to your brand, which is what you want your viewers to know about.
This strategy is linked with the other one of releasing multiple videos simultaneously. Your viewers get to see your own videos as related content. After you get to the most viewed page, you can add more generic tags that can help the video show up in search engines.
5. Create emotional content
There are a number of studies that show that emotional content is behind most viral video marketing campaigns. More specifically, videos with content that increases emotions like anxiety and amusement. Videos that elicit intense emotions are likely to be shared twice more than those which do not. Better still, positive videos are shared 30% more than negative videos.Some of the more intense positive emotions include: astonishment, hilarity and inspiration. Another strong emotion to leverage is surprise. Research further shows that men are more likely to share content that invokes fear and disgust, elements of surprise, than women. Knowledge of the emotions that result in shareability makes you want to create ads that will elicit these specific emotions. Shareability goes a long way in making a video go viral.
Conclusion
As we have seen, making your branded video to go viral is no mean feat. You need to incorporate the above steps in your viral video marketing strategy. They are all built around timing, building an audience, engagement and distribution.
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