How to get viral marketing right

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It is the dream of every marketer to launch a campaign that will go as viral as the Lay's "Do us a flavor" campaign, or Chipotle's "The Scarecrow." Unlike what it seems, viral marketing campaigns can be extremely expensive. One of the speakers at a recent marketing convention I attended nailed it when she said, "Viral marketing is like drug research. You may have to shell out countless dollars without guarantee that it will work. But when it does, you will profit hundred times over."

So how do you ensure you have the right elements for a successful viral marketing campaign? Start here.

Appeal to the child within

Regardless of the demographic you are targeting, viral campaigns work when your campaign tries to appeal to the child within all of us. Take the Lay's campaign, for example. The product is consumed by anybody from teens upwards. But in a video with singing bacon, rhyming lines and funny animations, Lay's got the point across. As of today, this video has been viewed more than 12 million times just on YouTube.

Add elements that have shareability

When Chipotle launched its Scarecrow campaign to create awareness about animal confinement, synthetic hormones, and harmful pesticides, it did not just build an animated short film. The team complemented this video with a mobile gaming app that viewers could download and play. The campaign worked because both these products helped push the virality of the other -- people who watched the short film proceeded to download the app. The rising downloads of the app brought it more visibility among mobile gamers. As more and more people downloaded the app and played the game, they were motivated to view the short film that inspires the game. This rising viewership brought greater visibility to the film on YouTube. It's like how nuclear fission works -- but in a good way. So, how could you do this? For starters, you could build mobile apps for your conventions, ad campaigns, and almost every marketing activity.

Build the best campaign

This goes without saying but a lot of marketers -- with their assumption that viral marketing has to be cheap -- do a half-baked job. This has never worked. For viral marketing, you need to go for the full monty. The difference between viral marketing campaigns and traditional campaigns is not that the former is cheaper to produce. Instead, it is that a successful viral campaign can make multiple times ROI that traditional campaigns cannot achieve. So, in order to get there, the focus has to be on producing the best campaign -- regardless of the costs involved.

Evoke an emotion from the audience

How do you measure the success or failure of a viral campaign? YouTube views? Facebook likes? These are not metrics you can measure when you are just starting. The rule of thumb to a successful viral marketing is that it should evoke a strong feeling in the audience. No matter if your campaign is a video, or a game, or a textual content -- does it make the audience feel good? Does it make them want to cry? Does it get them angry about the world? It doesn't matter what kind of this emotion is. As long as it generates a strong feeling about something from the audience, your campaign is likely to succeed. So to be sure that your campaign is executed well, always test it on a captive audience to see if it generates the kind of emotion you think the campaign should generate.

Besides all this, the timing of the launch matters a lot. You should build your campaign's theme around the general sentiment during the time of the launch. For instance, people are happy during a festival season, and sad if a national hero just died. Launching a happy video during the latter would be inappropriate and may not evoke the same kind of virality that you might want.