What is Considered Viral Growth Marketing?
Marketing is a broad term used to describe the various methods of promoting your business or product. You can use television, radio, print media, and many other forms of advertisement to promote your products. There are also different growth strategies for marketing, such as organic, viral, and paid marketing.
Organic refers to using natural social networks like word of mouth without any cash exchanged between marketers and influencers.
On the other hand, viral marketing takes advantage of existing social networks but requires some investment from marketers into their influencers (i.e., in the form of coupons). Paid means paying for advertising by purchasing ads through Google Adwords or Facebook Ads etc.
What is Viral Marketing?
In general terms, viral marketing refers to influencing people to share a product or service with their friends. It is different from organic marketing in that it requires influencers in the social circle to take some form of action to learn about a product and try it out. To achieve this, marketers use techniques such as offering discounts and coupons, providing free samples, or simply sharing through word of mouth.
Viral growth marketing refers specifically to creating content that will naturally go viral and drive traffic towards your brand without you having to pay influencers.
Often, these videos can reach millions of people worldwide without much cost involved on the part of the marketer (i.e., other than time). This type of marketing also takes advantage of existing networks like YouTube, Facebook, etc.
The best part of viral growth marketing is that, once your video goes viral, it will continue to drive new traffic towards your product or brand for a long time without you having to spend anything.
Of course, this strategy takes a lot more work than simply paying influencers to buy an ad, but the returns tend to be much higher and last much longer.
What does it take?
Creating a viral video doesn’t automatically guarantee millions of views. There are certain traits that every successful video has in common which make them likely to go viral (e.g., bad lip-syncing). This means that the marketer first needs to create engaging content then promote it through existing social networks like Facebook, YouTube, etc.
The most important thing is to make sure that the content is relevant to your business or product. For example, you can create a video about using your products to attract existing customers and drive them towards future purchases.
How do marketers measure success?
Well, it’s not as simple as counting the number of views on the video because most users don’t watch videos all the way through, and others might share them without watching them.
For the marketer to determine whether or not a particular campaign was successful, various analytics tools are used, such as Google Analytics. That can also help you figure out the type of content that went viral so that you can replicate this strategy in future campaigns with even more success.
How do you calculate viral growth?
Viral growth is calculated based upon the number of new users acquired through a particular campaign divided by several views on all user-generated content.
For example, let’s say the marketer has 100 people aware of their brand in total, and during April, they get 1000 views with 10% (100) becoming customers. During May, they have 2000 views, with 20% (400) becoming customers.
In this case, the marketer can consider a viral marketing viral strategy successful because 400 new users were acquired per 1000 views, which means that 40% of viewers became customers or created viral content themselves.
Here you can learn more about growth hacking marketing!
- What Are The Growth Hacking Techniques?
- What is Growth Process in Growth Hacking?
- Growth Hacking Guide
What is considered growth marketing?
Essentially, growth marketing is viral growth plus a substantial amount of paid advertising like paying for Google Adwords. Marketing strategy becomes more complex as marketers need to understand their customers’ purchasing behaviors to determine the best way to reach them and promote their products.
In general terms, every business needs some form of market penetration (e.g., SEO or PPC) and having some viral campaign (provided that they want to grow).
For example, if your goal is to reach every man between 30 – 40 who lives within a 1-mile radius around you, this would require a combination of organic search marketing techniques such as SEO combined with paid ads on mobile platforms using GPS targeting.
In this case, organic growth would attract all men between 30 – 40 within a 1-mile radius, while advertisements on mobile platforms would help you reach the ones who care about your brand and are interested in your products.
How Do You Achieve Viral Growth?
Create an engaging content
That includes your brand or product relevant to a problem that people face and are looking for solutions online. For example, if you run a pizza restaurant, create a video about making the perfect pizza at home, which can be delivered to someone’s house within 30 minutes.
Promote it through existing social networks like Facebook, YouTube, etc.
This will help increase the number of views on your content and spread awareness about your business/product in general because users tend to share interesting videos with their friends and family members who have similar interests.
Add “share” buttons throughout your website.
This will help your visitors share your content directly from your page.
Use third-party social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Pinterest, or Disqus.
These sites are perfect for promoting new content because their users are usually very specific about the niche they target, so you can reach out to a very targeted audience without much effort. Just make sure that you don’t use automated systems in order to submit your content at these platforms because it is considered spamming, which will get it instantly removed from the site.
Use paid advertising
(e.g., Facebook ads) or partner with influencers who have a large following on social media channels in order to drive traffic towards your website/content and increase brand awareness among people who are interested in your products.
Create a referral program
Referral program, which rewards existing users for inviting their friends to try out the new product or service. You can use third-party tools like ReferralCandy, FriendBuy, Refersion, or Click&Paid to manage these campaigns as they provide bulk messaging capabilities and automate campaign management so that you don’t need to manually track invites and payments to all of your customers/users.
Keep updating your content on a daily basis.
Post daily with unique information that provides value to your readers because this will help you improve search engine rankings as well as increase trust among visitors leading towards higher conversion rates and vice versa.
Use social media sites (e.g., Facebook)
To find out what type of content your users like the most in order to further improve engagement rates and increase chances for successful viral campaigns.
Consider using influencer marketing.
Consider hiring influencers with a huge audience because their endorsement carries a lot of weight when it comes to promoting products and services online due to their credibility among people who are interested in a specific niche or industry that these testimonials target.
You can use third-party tools like FameBit, BuzzSumo, or Traackr, which provide competitive analysis reports regarding famous people within certain niches so you can reach out to them directly and purchase endorsements before someone else does!
Summary
Viral growth marketing is often confused with organic marketing, but it does require some investment from marketers into influencers. However, the returns of this type of organic marketing are often much higher and last much longer. Marketers can determine whether or not a certain campaign was successful using analytics tools like Google Analytics etc.