In this digital marketing era, marketers are finding ways to maximize their audience reach. At the same time, they aim to reduce costs associated with marketing campaigns. Viral content marketing is, therefore, becoming a necessity for many businesses.

Viral content marketing is one of the cost-effective ways to reach millions of people across the globe. In this post, I will cover all you need to know about viral content.

What is Viral Content?

Viral content refers to the type of content that rapidly becomes popular and is extensively shared through social media, email, news websites, or any other digital platform. It can be any piece of content, such as image, infographic, video, or article.

Viral content spreads like a virus. It can quickly reach hundreds of thousands of people, engaging them with your content. Creating viral content aims to reach the maximum number of people rapidly.

Why is Viral Content Important?

Creating viral can benefit your business in many ways, a few of which are:

Greater Audience Reach

Viral content significantly increases your audience reach. People will share it across different platforms and forums, making it reach the global public. Since different platforms have distinct users, viral content reaches audiences you cannot get through traditional marketing campaigns.

Brand Awareness

Viral content boosts brand awareness by reaching the maximum number of people in a short time. People become familiar with the brand and talk about it with others. Many would be curious to learn more about your brand or business. In short, more people become aware of your offerings and services.

Cost-effective Marketing

In comparison to other content marketing channels, viral content is the least expensive. It does not involve hefty advertisement costs, making it an ideal way to reach a broader audience base. All you need to do is create content that people would love and share with others.

The only significant cost involved in creating viral content is the costs associated with content creation. You may require a professional tool for creating images or infographics. Similarly, you may also need grammar-checking tools like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and WhiteSmoke.

Fast Business Growth

The more people you reach through your content, the more leads you generate. A reasonable number of people who receive your content will visit your website or social media account. They may become followers or subscribe to a newsletter. You can then target those people through email marketing campaigns, convincing them to become customers.

Enhanced User Engagement

Viral comment generates comments and likes, increasing user engagement. Users interact with your brand more, expressing their concerns, asking questions, and giving valuable feedback. As a result, they may become loyal customers.  

Increased Credibility

The more people you reach through your content, the more likely you will gain recognition. In other words, the more people talk about your brand or business, the more credibility you earn.

It is human psychology that people trust brands popular among the masses. Viral content makes people talk about your brand, making it popular.

What Makes Content Go Viral?

The following are a few of the essential features of viral content.

Readability

Viral content is easy to read and comprehend. Even if your content provides the most valuable information, it can only gain popularity if readable. You can only reach the maximum audience if your content is simple and easy to comprehend for audiences of all knowledge levels.

Viral content contains common and well-known words instead of jargon, abbreviations, or complex words. Additionally, it has short sentences and paragraphs.

I recommend using a plugin or tool like AIOSEO for a detailed overview of readability. Using AIOSEO, you can analyze the readability score of your content and improve it.

Creativity

Viral content is different from the traditional content. It is unique and has something new to offer. Therefore, if you want your content to go viral, you should create something that stands out from the crowd.

Creative content keeps its audience engaged. It instantly catches the audience’s attention and tempts the people to share it. Most importantly, it is memorable and sustainable.

Visual Appeal

An essential feature of viral content is that it is visually appealing. Visually appealing content contains exciting images, attractive typography, and a simple yet eye-catching layout.

The structure of the content also affects its visual appeal. You should use subheadings, lists, tables, and bullet points to enhance appeal. Additionally, ensure there are enough white spaces to make content pleasant for the eyes.  

Emotional Appeal

Like visual appeal, viral content is emotionally appealing as well. It taps into high-arousal emotions, such as excitement, humor, happiness, surprise, and anger. As a result, people experience the urge to share the content with others, including family, friends, colleagues, and other acquaintances.  

Credibility

People tend to share content they find credible. On the contrary, they are less likely to share content containing information they do not trust. One way to build trust is to quote expert sources within your content. Another way to make your content credible is to include statistics.

You can also reach out to experts or influencers seeking answers or information to be included in your content. This approach can help your content go viral as experts and influencers tend to share content that cites them.  

Sharable

Another factor determining if your content will go viral is the sharing ability of the content. Content that can be easily shared has a higher probability of going viral. Remember, people may not take the burden of finding ways to share the content.

Therefore, ensuring it is super easy for the audience to share your content is critical. As a best practice, always use social sharing buttons in your post. You can use a tool or plugin like Novashare to include a social sharing button.

Best Practices to Create Viral Content

Understand Your Audience 

 Before creating viral content, you should have a clearly defined target audience. Simply put, you can only create valuable content if you know who can benefit from it. Remember, relevant and practical content encourages people to share it with others.

You must first define and understand your audience to make content relevant and valuable. Understanding the audience means discovering the audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, challenges, and concerns. Once you have defined and understood your target audience, you can create content touching their pain points and interests.

The following are the five strategies to find your target audience:

1. Analyze the existing customer base.
2. Review social media analytics to learn about the demographics of followers and subscribers.
3. Use website analytics to learn about the demographics of website visitors.
4. Analyze competitors to discover who they are targeting.
5. Define who isn’t your audience.

Another advantage of understanding your audience is that you get to know about the social media platforms they use. Posting content on the right platforms increases the likelihood of it becoming viral.

Focus on Trending Topics

Writing about topics that are gaining popularity is the key to creating viral content. To learn if a topic is gaining popularity, I recommend using Google Trends. Type the topic and choose the location to learn about the audience’s interest.

Remember, depending on your business goals, you can choose the location and time period. For example, if you have a local business, you may wish to see the trend only in that region. Similarly, you can choose option ‘worldwide’ if you are targeting a global audience.

To create viral content, focus on topics in which interest is growing. However, you should avoid the topic if you see a decreasing trend.

Write a Powerful Title and Introduction

The title is the first thing your audience notices. It persuades the audience to read the content. Similarly, a well-written introduction ensures people will continue reading your content till the end. In short, both the title and introduction help build a positive impression.

Viral content has a powerful title and introduction. Great title increases make people click on your content. In contrast, an appealing introduction makes readers want to read till the end.

One way to write a powerful title and introduction is to use words that entice curiosity. For example, list posts tend to become viral because their titles arouse interest or desire to learn more.

Use Tempting Visuals

How often do you share content that has large blocks of text?

Probably never!

So is the case with everyone else. People will rarely share content having large blocks of text. On the other hand, visual content like images, videos, and infographics are shared more frequently. Notably, social media posts containing images have high engagement rates and tend to become viral.

Therefore, to create viral content, it is vital to include attractive visuals. For stock images, I recommend two popular marketplaces, envatoelements and shutterstock. However, you can use tools like Visme and Canva to create high-quality, engaging infographics.

Place Share Buttons above the Fold

An essential component of viral content is that it is optimized for sharing on social media platforms. For this purpose, marketers include social sharing buttons. However, did you know the location of social sharing buttons also plays a critical role and influences the probability of content sharing?

Many visitors may not read your content till the end. And if the social sharing buttons are at the end of the post, the visitors may not get to see them. On the other hand, placing share buttons above the fold ensures all visitors will notice them even if they do not scroll down the post.  

The greater visibility of social sharing buttons significantly increases the probability of your content being shared on social platforms, making it viral.

Evoke Emotions 

Don’t be amazed if I tell you that people can read and watch content without experiencing any emotion at all.

It is doubtful people will share something they don’t feel any emotional connection with. On the contrary, if your content makes your audience feel a certain way, they will likely share it.

To create viral content, you must tap into the following emotions:

• Awe
• Curiosity
• Empathy
• Happiness
• Amusement

Although content that evokes positive emotions is shared more often, content evoking negative emotions, such as anger and anxiety, also tends to go viral.  

Be Practical

If your only intention is to create viral content, you may fail. Instead, if your goal is to provide valuable content to your audience, the probability of content becoming viral increases significantly. In other words, viral content offers value to its audience. It is relevant and useful. Therefore, be practical when creating content.

Practical content is educational and informational. It provides its audience with a clear call to action, guiding users on how they can achieve their goals. People share practical content frequently to help others and build social relationships. The more valuable the users find your content, the more they will share it.

Publish Content during Peak Hours

Publishing the content at the right time is another effective way to make your content go viral. Therefore, publish your content at the right time if you wish to reach the maximum audience.

But the question is, what the right time is?

The right time is when most people can watch or read your content. In other words, it is when most people are online on a specific platform. However, there may be cases when your target audience uses the platform at a time other than the peak hour. In such cases, you must figure out the right time to publish.

In short, it takes time to determine when your content gets the maximum exposure. Experiment with publishing times across platforms and see what works best for your business.  

As a best practice, you should schedule your content beforehand. CoSchedule is a popular marketing calendar for organizing, scheduling, and posting social media and blog posts.

Promote Content to Influencers

Influencers are individuals who can persuade the opinions and thoughts of people. They have a huge fan following and have the power to convince their followers to perform a specific action. Therefore, to make your content go viral, you should get the influencers to promote it.

However, remember it is critical to find experts and influencers in the relevant field. Only the relevant influencers can help you achieve your goal. It is primarily because of two reasons. One, relevant influencers have the same people as their followers as your target audience. Second, people only trust the opinions of those experts in the field.

Conclusion

Although viral content can significantly boost brand awareness and increase sales, it is challenging to create it. The truth is there is no known strategy to create viral content. However, following the above-mentioned best practices can significantly increase your chances of success.

Besides following the best practices, it is essential to discover what type of content works best in your niche. Similarly, experiment with different kinds of content to determine what makes your target audience share it.