Joey Armstrong is a marketing professional that specializes in social media marketing techniques. With a background in sales and development, Joey Armstrong’s extensive knowledge of these methods can bring to life marketing campaigns for businesses. In the following article, Mr. Armstrong explains how ad campaigns go viral, and what’s required for these campaigns to be so successful.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Philips and Movember’s Right Under Your Nose. The No-Makeup Selfie. While all wildly different, they all have one thing in common — they’re fantastic examples of viral ad campaigns.
Joey Armstrong explains that viral marketing is a subsection of digital advertising involving spreading business information from person to person. Often dubbed “word of mouth marketing,” it uses the audience themselves to transfer news about products or services, thus increasing brand awareness.
The main aim of such campaigns? Create an advertisement people want to share, so companies benefit from increased visitors and sales.
How Viral Marketing Works
Joey Armstrong says that by crafting an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing advert, social media users will undoubtedly share it with their network of friends, family, and colleagues. Therefore, businesses’ messages will spread rapidly and widely (i.e., go viral) and reach a huge piece of their target audience pie.
Companies are encouraged to get creative with their advertising. From witty tweets to catchy images to inspiring or funny videos, almost anything can go viral these days, thanks to social media.
Joey Armstrong says that people tend to share viral content through email and social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
Why Businesses Benefit from Viral Marketing
Businesses applaud viral marketing for many reasons, especially the rapid rate at which their messages reach the masses states Joey Armstrong. Once an ad campaign goes viral, it’ll spread to all corners of the internet within a very short time period.
Plus, viral messages are highly credible according to Joey Armstrong. Social media users who pick up adverts shared by people they trust are more likely to have positive opinions of the company associated with the message.
On top of that, businesses don’t need massive marketing budgets to deploy viral ad campaigns. After all, they rely on people spreading information organically and voluntarily.
But It Isn’t All Sunshine and Roses
Naturally, viral marketing isn’t perfect. Specialists encourage businesses to consider the potential downsides before enacting this campaign.
For instance, viral adverts may be considered spam, especially when spread via email. There’s a high chance that a company’s well-meaning message could end up sitting in their audience’s spam folders, lost forever claims Joey Armstrong.
Additionally, as anybody who has read a magazine or quickly flicked through a Twitter feed will know, negativity spreads faster than positivity. While unfortunate, it’s the truth. So, businesses risk less-than-favorable information going viral, rather than all the good aspects of their organization.
And on the more analytical side, marketers profess that it’s incredibly challenging to measure the success of viral ad campaigns. Typically, companies need to run extensive market research to determine whether the viral message had the desired effect.
How Content Goes Viral
Despite the potential drawbacks, Joey Armstrong says that the positives outweigh them when viral ad campaigns are deployed correctly by skillful digital marketing specialists who understand the criteria for viral content.
Not every single piece goes viral. However, businesses stand the best chance of rapid circulation across a wide audience if their content includes:
- Social currency — In other words, the influence they already possess over their audience.
- Emotional triggers — People are more likely to share a message they genuinely care about.
- Practical information or stories — Tips, lifehacks, and other useful tidbits work wonders to help push content out to the masses.
By tailoring texts, images, or videos with the above in mind, companies can increase their message’s likelihood of reaching that sky-high viral status.
Why Are Viral Ad Campaigns So Effective?
In a world so internet- and social-media-filled, viral ad campaigns can thrive. It presents endless opportunities for companies to create content and reach users all over the world at lightning-fast speeds.
Joey Armstrong says that since viral content requires some sort of emotional respect, consumers of such advertisements are not just more likely to share the content — they’re more inclined to convert to paying customers. Leaving a positive impression, particularly in the first instance, is an almost guaranteed client for life.
Alongside this, viral ad campaigns powerfully create strong demand for a company’s product or service. Thus, they’re a brilliant lead generator, regardless of the business’s size says Joey Armstrong.
Viral Marketing: The Ticket to Company Growth
As far as digital advertising goes, viral marketing is one of the quickest ways companies can spread information about their products or services.
Joey Armstrong says this method boosts any type of business when expertly conducted, thanks to the world’s focus on social media, the emotional response it elicits, and the ability to create a sense of urgency and demand out of thin air. Even with the potential downsides, viral marketing has the power to skyrocket any company to dizzying heights of success.
