Every marketer out there wants their content to go Viral. Isn’t it? As marketers, their first desire is to get maximum engagement and traction. More engagements higher the chances of lead generation and subsequent conversions.

The concept of viral marketing involves utilizing the existing social network that can spread the message just like a virus, hence the origination of its name. The virality or the exponential spread of content majorly depends on how fast the content is shared repeatedly until it reaches the masses.

Types of Viral Marketing

1) Organic/ Amplified: This type of viral marketing is organic and usually relies on its existing social network to boost the marketing results.

2) Controlled viral marketing: It is strategically planned with goals. It can involve paid advertising and using different strategies for the content to go viral.

How to Create a Viral Marketing

A Book on contagious states the reason why things can go Viral, and is presented under an acronym called STEPPS – translating into Social Currency, Triggers, Emotions, Practical Value, Public, and Stories. Let’s Dive into each below: 

Social Currency: Anything that makes things look better has, a high chance of it getting shared.

Triggers: Anything that can help your mind to get triggered higher will be the chances of its shareability. The trigger can be created by negative, political, insensitive, funny, and sensitive content.

Emotions: The human mind is not rational especially when it comes to emotions. Emotional content has a high chance to get shared. Meme Marketing is becoming very famous, where marketers leverage the latest memes and create their content around the same. Memes have found to be extremely sharable, and very much popular form of content among the young and the gen z audiences.

Public: The easier and more convenient the content publicity, the higher its shareability.

Practical Value: If your content is highly informative, people will share it with others.

Stories: The better you are at storytelling the likelihood of your content getting shared increases. A good storyteller is always a good marketeer. Because narrating a good story is not easy, you need to connect with the audience at a subconscious level. Creating good stories involves thinking like your audience. 

Making content viral requires a high factor of shareability but sometimes it’s luck as well. There are times when unintentional content can become viral and content that has been planned receives less traction.