While a full blown viral campaign may seem unachievable for many, studying what drives the most successful viral campaigns could provide valuable insight to content marketers in terms of creating communicable marketing content.
So what are the key factors for successful traction of marketing campaigns across the web?
Triggering an Emotion
Berger and Milkman (2012) claim that content that triggers an emotional reaction is more likely to gain peer-to-peer traction than functional content. Furthermore, triggering negative emotions, specifically anger or anxiety, increases the likelihood of sharing, although promotional marketing will not often aim to associate these feelings with their own brand (Berger and Milkman, 2012).
One campaign which made good use of this type of emotions was Always’ Like A Girl campaign, which to date has reached over 50 million views on their YouTube channel.
Always: Like A Girl Video Campaign (Always YouTube, 2014)
More commonly, content containing humour is shared between individuals and groups as even positive emotions such as this are contagious (Du, Fan and Feng, 2014). Despite dealing with a very serious topic, Metro communicated a public health message with humour and to date have over 100 million views on YouTube with the Dumb Ways to Die video.
Metro: Dumb Ways to Die Campaign (Metro YouTube, 2012)
Being Specific to the Viewer
Botha and Reyneke (2013) show that when content is specific to the viewer, and they perceive it to be relevant to themselves and their circle of connections, then they will be more likely to share content. This is satisfying the spreadabililty factor of the SPIN framework which Mills (2012) has created to model user content sharing.
For example, BuzzFeed article ’21 Things All Sisters with a Three-Year Age Gap Know’ already reached ‘trending’ status less than 24 hours after being published (Buzzfeed, 2015).
Figure One: BuzzFeed’s specifically targeted content (BuzzFeed, 2015)
Influencer Involvement
Celebrities and high profile influencers can also increase the likelihood of something spreading, for example the No-Makeup Selfie campaign which aimed to raise money for Cancer Research was supported by large numbers of female celebrities who joined the campaign by sharing their own user created content of self-portraits via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, reportedly raising £8 million for the charity (Guardian, 2014). Incentivising an appropriate influencer to share content can also significantly increase the reach of your content (Kumar and Mirchandani, 2012).
Network Characteristics
Social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook are designed to facilitate sharing by making the process as simple as possible. Mills (2012) claims that content is more likely to be shared if the channel that it is on makes sharing as simple as possible by placing the share tool close to the content and quick to complete, such as the single-click ‘retweet’ function on Twitter.
Furthermore, having content spanning multiple channels will increase the likelihood of it being shared as well as the size of the networks that it is on, which determines the number of people that the content can be shared to at once (Mills, 2012).
A strong example of a successful multimedia marketing campaign is John Lewis’ ‘Monty the Penguin’ campaign which spanned Youtube, television, paid search, email and Twitter (Ashford, 2015) and lead to a 19% increase in online purchases over the Christmas period on the previous year for John Lewis (Agg, 2015).
Figure Two: Monty The Penguin Twitter (Monty the Penguin Twitter, 2015)
Overall, these successful campaigns which gained high levels of traction online strongly support the work of Berger and Milkman (2012), Botha and Reyneke (2013), Du, Fan and Feng (2014) and Mills (2012). These common themes can be abstracted from viral campaigns and applied to the creation and sharing of content created to boost brand awareness and customer engagement so it’s important to incorporate network and content design specifics such as these into your content marketing strategy and planning processes for success.
For more information on what makes content go viral visit http://bit.ly/1J9NClW to read Mills’ (2012) SPIN framework and http://bit.ly/1zqiYov to read Botha and Reyneke’s (2013) article on motivation for sharing on social media.
References
Agg, S. (2015) Logistics industry this Christmas, Motor Transport, 26 January 2015, No. 1, pg 14
Ashford, Z. (2015) ‘Mobile Marketing’ [Lecture Notes] Brighton: University of Brighton Business School, Unpublished
Always YouTube (2014) ‘Like A Girl’ [Online] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs> [accessed 29th April 2015]
Berger, J. and Milkman, K. (2012) What Makes Online Content Viral?, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp 192-205
Botha, E. and Reyneke, M. (2013) To share or not to share: the role of content and emotion in viral marketing, Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp 160-171
BuzzFeed (2015) ’21 Things All Sisters With A Three-Year Age Gap Know’ [Online] <http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathaleggett/things-sisters-with-a-3-year-age-gap-just-know#.my5y5nQv3> [accessed 29th April 2015]
Du, J., Fan, X. and Feng, T. (2014) Group Emotional Contagion and Complaint Intentions in Group Service Failure, Journal of Service Research, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp 326-338
Guardian (2014) No-makeup selfies raise £8m for Cancer Research UK in six days, Guardian 25th March 2014 [Online] <http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/25/no-makeup-selfies-cancer-charity> [accessed 29th April 2015]
Ho, J. and Dempsey, M. (2010) Viral marketing: motivations to forward online content, Hournal of Business Research, Vol. 63, No. 9-10, pp 1000-1006
Kumar, V. and Mirchandani, R. (2012) Increasing the ROI of Social Media Marketing, MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 54, No. 1, pp 55-61
Metro YouTube (2012) ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ [Online] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw> [accessed 29th April 2015]
Mills, A. (2012) Virality in social media: the SPIN framework; Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp 162-169
Monty The Penguin Twitter (2015) ‘Monty the Penguin’ [Online] <https://twitter.com/MontyThePenguin> [accessed 29th April 2015]