31 Dec Creating Viral Content: Tips for Video and Digital Campaigns
Are you gambling with the success of your content? Don’t take chances. Follow a few simple strategies to make your content viral.
The premise of successful sports gambling is simple: bet on the outcome, and hope you’re right. For news creators in the digital world, the idea isn’t much different. Enter BuzzFeed, one of the country’s most success content and news distribution outlets. The idea? As a feature article in The Atlantic highlights, the once-small-start-up had one goal when it opened an office in 2006: find viral content before it went viral. And it succeeded. With one of the highest number of shares and reads of any modern news distributor/aggregator, BuzzFeed can teach us a thing or two (or three, in this case) about creating content in the digital age.
Highly Visual
Video is king. While news readership has remained surprisingly healthy in spite internet warnings to the contrary, the more visual your content, the more people will engage. What can this teach you? Develop your marketing campaigns with the visual narrative in mind. Rarely is a campaign successful without some form of visual media. You’re best served by keeping the door open for structuring a visual arc. This often means video production expertise is involved in the brainstorming process – a challenge for many companies that have never dipped a toe into the video pool. Trust us when we say it’s necessary. Video is only getting more popular as the number of available screens increases and average attention spans decrease.
Time Is Limited
Your customers don’t devote the same amount of attention to your content as they used to — partly by necessity, and partly by choice as a result of skipping availability (i.e. YouTube pre-roll ad options, TiVo, etc.). That means your message has only 5 to 15 seconds to get the point acorss — and preferably less. The average video has about 3 seconds to truly capture a viewer’s attention before moving on. What can you do? Keep time in mind as you develop your storyboard and campaign ideas. Front-load the message to get it across to viewers before they tune out. They may still leave, but they’ve heard what you have to say and, hopefully, developed a brand perception. Above all, make your idea contains a consistent, easily digestible and highly relatable theme.
Call to Action
If video is king, then sharing is its queen. No matter how great your content is, it won’t reach a wide array of viewers unless your audience decides it’s something worthy of sharing. This isn’t just a social media idea, it applies to corporate video and how-to content as well. Does it tell a story, solve a problem, show the answer to a common question?
Social media sharing — often facilitated through popularized influencers — can also be highly advantageous to your brand strategy. The goal in social sharing is often the coveted viral video response. To reach that point often requires identifying a few possible influencers that would appeal to your target demographic, then figuring out what might make those particular influencers more likely to share your content. Catering campaigns in this way is a great method for ensuring your content eventually goes viral. But don’t just stop with the blanket “share our [content]” strategy. For many viewers, this isn’t enough to encourage them to do so (unless your video is highly entertaining). Consider offering an incentive or running a contest (adhering to lottery laws, of course) that involves not only your content, but the eventual dissemination of it.
Curious about creating shareable video catered to the sharing culture, running a social media contest or other content marketing strategy? Contact Us!
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