What is viral content strategy?

Viral content marketing is a form of online advertising that uses viral techniques to get your brand noticed by as many people, as quickly as possible, through various content channels. This can be done through the use of videos, images, or other creative forms of content. Viral content spreads quickly (like, well, a virus). People see the material, love it and share it on social media.

Before you know it, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are interacting with your content. If you want to create viral content, you need to understand why the content goes viral in the first place. A study conducted by Buzzsumo analyzed 100 million blog posts and the results are a good starting point. Google Trends and BuzzSumo are other useful tools you can use to see what's increasing and turning into viral content.

A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research found that content that evokes emotions of “amazement,” surprise, or “anger” was 28% more likely to go viral. In reality, every piece of content that goes viral does so because of a different combination of factors. Viral content not only generates valuable traffic and greater engagement, but it can also increase sales and rankings on Google. It's not as simple as creating a pleasant read or relying on luck; however, you must plan and build your content in a particular way.

Creating viral content involves knowing your target audience intimately, touching a nerve and making the content shareable. Creating viral content has the potential to transform your marketing strategy into an accelerated, revenue-generating machine, and CC&A can help. Viral content helps you reach new people, spread your brand message and increase your credibility in a short time. This is perhaps the most difficult form of viral content for brands to achieve, since it's based on everything being aligned at once.

Creating content that invokes emotions naturally forces people to share the content with friends, colleagues or followers, which naturally gains momentum and goes viral. Making sure that your content is thoroughly researched, backed up with reliable sources, and includes unique aspects, such as an exclusive quote, increases your chances of it going viral. Last but not least, the world's best example of content marketing can go unnoticed if it's not shared by the right people right from the start.