Avoiding Viral Marketing Regrets
Viral marketing is one of the most sought-after phenomena in all of Internet marketing. For business people, there are few things sweeter than the idea of their product, idea, or message spreading across the vast reaches of the Internet with almost preternatural speed and profound impact.
As a result, when entrepreneurs finally manage to crack the code, so to speak, and get their first couple of viral campaigns to really take off, they can sometimes forget that there’s still work to be done.
See, for all of viral marketing’s potential, there exists a dark side: Once you send something out into cyberspace, it’s out there for keeps. If you screw up the planning, the execution will fail, and fail in a big way.
If you want to avoid such nasty consequences, then check out this handy guide from our experience on how to avoid viral marketing regrets.
Fact Check
This rule is as simple and as basic as they come, yet there are still people who overlook it. When preparing to execute a viral marketing campaign, always, always, ALWAYS make sure your research & statements of fact are legitimate!
Not only will you as a business owner or entity be made to look foolish if you misrepresent facts which can be verified through a simple Google search (which, by the way, you can rest assured that the people seeing your material will perform), but if you stray too far outside the realm of veracity, you can find yourself in serious legal trouble.
Unity is the Answer
No, you haven’t bumped your head and woken up in 1967. It’s just that in marketing, as with plenty of other things, the presentation of a solid, unified front is best. For example, everyone knows about Angry Birds. It’s a viral sensation, and that’s what you want to be, right? If so, then take a tip from them and always keep your campaigns to as few URLs as possible.
Think of it this way: When something goes viral on YouTube, people share a YouTube link. They don’t show each other 50,000 different URLs! Everyone knows that the hilarious cat-playing-piano video zinging around the office like wildfire is on YouTube, and thus, is easy to find, share, and, for the originators of the video, to measure.
This is also true for media outlets, at least until you’re very well established. Fragmented media not only makes media virulence more difficult to achieve, it also makes meaningful data analysis very hard to undertake.
You always want to be better the next time out, and if you don’t know what worked – and what didn’t – from your last campaign, then you’ve wasted your time and money, and you’re back at square one.
Son of a Glitch
Look, this one’s another no-brainer. You can have the best, most awesome, most life-changing viral campaign ever crafted by the hands of Man, but if your technology can’t handle the traffic, all your visitors will see is an error page. This will leave them disgusted, and it’ll leave your wallet empty.
These are not conditions you want to find yourself in, so to avoid this particular viral marketing regret, you simply need to ensure that your servers and other elements of your technical framework are updated and ready to take on the upswing in traffic your viral campaign will bring.
Use Protection
For your source files, that is. If the source material that makes up your campaign materials is left unprotected, people can steal it, change it, and stand on all your hard work to make money that should be yours.
Therefore, to save wads of cash, as well as the time & headache of rooting out material that looks suspiciously like your own, you should make sure that the only thing about your campaign that goes viral is the stuff that you WANT to go viral – viral YouTube spot or Reddit bit? Good.
Raw MP4s & Word documents just bursting with sensitive / proprietary info spread all over the web for anyone to read, copy, or manipulate as and when they see fit? Not so good. The quickest way for your viral campaign to fail is by not taking the time to protect the foundation it’s built upon. Take precautions.
And there you have it. Despite the somewhat lighthearted delivery method, the message behind this article is serious: Use caution and forethought when planning your viral marketing campaigns and you can avoid the viral marketing regrets that plague so many.
Guest post written by Alex Petrovic – Dejan SEO – Advanced SEO strategist and Link building team leader.