Viral Marketing: How To Become 1%

Is it possible to become the second Picasso?

I’ll reveal one big little secret: No one knows exactly how to succeed in a viral campaign. Because this is an area of ​​marketing that comes in contact with art. Emotions and subjectivity reign in art.

How to ride other people’s emotions? How to conquer someone else’s subjective perception? If another marketing guru or (more often) an agency manager begins to convince you that success is 100% guaranteed, do not believe it. Either he is a god, or an idiot, or (more likely) he really needs your money. It is 100% possible to provide a surge of bots that supposedly scan your virus. Which often happens in practice.

Uncovering the secret of the success of viruses is like uncovering the secret of the success of Dali and Picasso. All the components of their work can be disassembled, and this has been done more than once. But even having become an expert on the life and work of Dali, one can (and most likely will) remain an ordinary artist.

Several decades ago, NLP appeared and became widespread. It teaches that anyone can achieve the same results as a genius (or anyone of your choice). You just need to study all the features of his behavior, and then repeat the same. This is a simplified retelling of the NLP postulate and yet … And yet, with all the popularity of NLP, there are no more geniuses in the world.

The success of viruses in many cases is a surprise to the authors themselves. However, success loves the prepared. As in Sportloto: you can choose 5 out of 36 by paying 200 rubles; but you can — 10 out of 36, unfastening the state 20,000. Both, most likely, will lose, but the second has a slightly higher chance. Preparedness means adhering to a number of basic rules, which I will talk about using the example of the wrong video.

What do ski and paper have in common?

In January 2010, at the popular forum for managers, Executive, they raised the topic of why the viral videos of the paper company Zoom did not go viral. The Zoom manager wanted to find out the reasons for the failure. Before writing this article, I once again looked at YouTube: for more than 2 years, the video has collected only 90,000 views and 14 comments. This is a failure.

Advertising. A viral video shouldn’t look like a gift from a wealthy philanthropist. Here’s a gift from the firm for you, Banderlog, and now come to me. When a virus starts with displaying the logo of the “favorite sponsor” across the entire width of the screen, it loses its status and is perceived as an advertisement. The author of the video must be implied, not shown. The last “Mission Impossible” was a promotional video for BMW cars. But the introduction of BMW into the plot was realized in the most natural way, unobtrusively, and therefore did not cause rejection and skepticism. Imagine the movie began with a large BMW logo showcasing. We would be irritated by everything related to this brand, throughout the entire plot. If you can’t do without a logo, put it at the end of the video. However, I advise you to resort to more subtle methods.

Plot. And here we come to the second drawback of the Zoom virus. What connects office paper to skiing? Nothing, except the color of the paper and the snow. But this is a somewhat artificial, overly marketing parallel. In life, people rarely build such associations: paper — snow — skis. Such designs only exist in the minds of marketers.

The less wise you are, the better for the success of the virus. Think like real people, not like faithful marketing drones. When a person looks at skis, he thinks of skis. When on paper — on paper. Are you looking for sales and a “rise in fame” or are you seriously considering starting a ski school?

Come up with a plot involving paper. Let the plot clearly read in this (and not say!) How snow-white, soft, and will endure everything. There was once a video in which they collected panels from stickers (yellow pieces of paper). So this is an interesting idea that captivates and shows the product. I want to repeat once again: in a virus, the main message must be understood, read at a time.

Utility. Let’s move on to the next point. I guess why the authors of the video chose the theme of skiing. They wanted the video to be useful so that it would be watched and shared with friends. I’m not sure if a virus is supposed to be useful. What I’m sure of is this: a virus should either inspire, or amuse, or scare. In short, it affects the heart, not the brain. In our case, we see exclusively work on the brain.

Quality. It doesn’t matter if you work with the heart or the brain, do not forget about the quality of the broadcast material. The level of the video in our example is amateurish. Dull, too dark light, lack of interesting angles make this creation a rather ordinary work of an amateur. The Internet is filled with such filming and instructions. The Zoom video did not bring anything of its own, nothing special. And this is his main mistake because viral marketing is a story about uniqueness.

Instead of a resume.

Viral marketing is the realm of the possible, not the guaranteed. This is a world of experimentation, failure, and accidental victories, not a precise miscalculation and a completely predictable result. That is why I do not recommend everyone to try their hand in this area. Not because “it won’t work.” Because not everyone is ready to take viral marketing as it is. Customers want guarantees, accurate forecasts, and sales. But they get a certain product, 200,000 views by bots, and 0% sales growth.

Your success is not guaranteed, but more likely when you start playing viral marketing, do it with all your heart, not be afraid to invent and surprise yourself, without demanding guarantees of success from art. Only in this case will you liberate your imagination and revive your viral product by investing a part of your soul into it. And everything that is done with a soul is valued very dearly.