Viral Marketing Strategy For eCommerce In 2023
Updated on November 14, 2022 in Ecommerce by Nishant Shrimali
We all have a dream of overnight success. If you are running an eCommerce, it may be getting mind-boggling sales in just a few days or making your brand stand out to all your targeted audiences.
Well, what if you can make all this true? A Viral Marketing Strategy is one of the most powerful eCommerce marketing tools that you can use to boost eCommerce sales and build a brand of your own.
By the way, you don’t need expensive tools, software, and a bunch of people. All you need is a drive to reach out to your audience in the best manner possible.
In the following article, we are going to discuss:
- What is Viral Marketing?
- What are the Advantages of Viral Marketing?
- Types of Viral Marketing
- How Does Viral Marketing Work
- Building The Best Viral Marketing Strategy
- Most Memorable Viral Marketing Examples
If you are all set, let’s get started with this amazing article.
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral Marketing is a strategic marketing method that motivates people to share a brand name, an idea, or a product, so much so that a majority of the targeted group is aware and is talking about it.
To put it in a much simpler way, Viral marketing is like spreading a buzz, so that more and more people get aware, as well as interested in your brand and your products.
What are the Advantages of Viral Marketing?
Ok so you now know what viral marketing is, but unless you are aware of the advantages of viral marketing campaigns it might not seem a fair deal of effort. Hence, here are the Benefits of Viral Marketing strategies.
Low-Cost Advertising
Believe it or not, any of the viral marketing strategies which were successful in the past decade, spend less than their PPC campaign to go viral.
You might need an initial push to get the ball rolling, but if you do it right, the returns will be unmatched.
As soon as your content hits the right audience, all your efforts will be successful.
Fast Growth
Viral literally means being popular in a short period of time. Now be it a new show, song, or viral marketing campaign. As said in the beginning, your eCommerce can turn out to be an overnight success, but only with a hit-and-trial method.
A successful viral marketing strategy is one where it drops a spike in the interest of people in a brand. And yes it isn’t all in your hand, but with the right steps, fast growth is not a myth anymore.
Mainstream Media Exposure
Your eCommerce marketing strategy could be more than just a social media marketing campaign.
While as an eCommerce, you might be invested in inbound marketing only, a viral marketing strategy can earn you a cover story from news channels and other media platforms.
This allows your eCommerce to reach a much wider audience and create an omnichannel brand out of your eCommerce.
Increased Credibility
A popular brand name and a logo are always trustworthy. Moreover, trusting a brand that everyone is talking about is much easier than the one you come across. A viral marketing campaign does all for you. It makes people talk about you, be aware of you and trust you by purchasing your products.
Generate Traffic and Sales
This is the most obvious advantage of a viral marketing strategy. When people talk, they want to know more, hence growing your eCommerce traffic. When everyone talks about a product, everyone wants it hence growing your sales.
Also Read: 12 Christmas Marketing Ideas For Your eCommerce Store
What are the Types of Viral Marketing?
While there are no specific boundaries to make your eCommerce go viral, here are some old-proven types of Viral Marketing campaigns that you can use.
Emotional Marketing
In emotional marketing, you target the emotion of your audience. The aim is to raise an emotion, be it satisfied, happy, angry, concerned, or any other which may make people fall for your brand.
The stronger your content builds an emotion the more viral it gets. Mostly, it works when your content is directly relatable to every last individual of your target audience.
Incentivized
The most commonly known parts of incentivized viral marketing strategy are referral marketing, giveaways, and affiliate marketing. In the following type, you motivate your audience to share or promote your products in order to get some incentive in return.
Lucky
It is no secret that a good portion of the viral marketing strategy is luck. It’s about sharing the right content at the right time which shall reach the right audience. If you are successful you would hit a home run, and if not you can jump on to the next idea.
Engineered
Unlike being lucky, it is a completely strategized type of viral marketing strategy. This has a much higher percentage of being successful as every trend and action is closely observed and managed by the marketers.
Pass-along
Pass along is the most common type of viral marketing strategy and campaign where people share or we can say passes the message to others. The perfect example of the following is word-of-mouth marketing.
Building The Best Viral Marketing Strategy
You can choose any type of viral marketing mentioned above, but in order to run them successfully, you would need the best viral marketing strategy. Hence, here is what you were looking for.
Understand Your Audience
Not all the people in the world are your customers. You need to know who your potential customers are and how your brand can affect them. Your products must affect your targeted potential customer directly.
Understanding who these people are would thoroughly give you an idea about what content would they like, and what type of content they would share with their friends and colleagues.
Be Aware Of The Trend
In order to catch the eye of your audience, you need to be present where they are looking. Being active on trends is among the best ways you can understand what your audience may like and you can do the same.
This isn’t a one-time thing though. You need to hit every possible trend, in order to keep it consistent. It will give you a much better probability to go viral.
Build A Brand Emotion
What would you like people to feel when they buy your products. Surely this is a question we do not come across most often, but it is very important to have an answer.
For example, Pepsi has been a brand that encourages energy, where Coca-cola focuses on Happy emotions like family and friends, meet-ups, etc.
Using emotional branding gives your audience a much better way to connect to your brand.
Showcase Brand Humor
In Viral Marketing Strategy, Humour is among the most popular pieces of content that are being shared by people on the internet. The most common reason being the social media viral campaigns using meme marketing.
Brands across the world have understood that in order to go viral, they need to make people laugh. Hence, while you are following your trends, we would motivate you to bring humor to your content.
Incentivize Your Products
Incentivizing your product is something that never gets old. “Buy This to Get This Free” – One of the most common lines we have seen that brands use to increase their sales. And the most interesting part is that audiences still love it.
Hence, introducing it to your range of products is another great way to get started with your viral marketing strategy.
Make Your Audience Feel Good
Everyone likes to feel good and special. Moreover, when the message comes from the brand that a customer is loyal to or uses regularly, it gives spark to share it with friends and family.
Do you remember the most famous Coca-cola campaign “Share A Coke With”? They switched their iconic logo with the names of people.
To be specific 250 most common American names. This triggered a viral session around the brand hence helping them get all the appreciation.
Be A Social Geek
Viral marketing happens when you care about what goes viral and what people are liking. In addition, posting something out of your viral marketing strategy isn’t enough. You need to stay active on your social media platform.
Replying to the comments, commenting on another post, encouraging people to share their experience, and building an audience of their own. All this is very important to have a successful viral marketing campaign.
Become an Expert
People like to learn directly from the experts, hence the content coming from an expert goes viral instantly. If you don’t believe, the Twitter handle of Elon Musk is the best example of a viral marketing campaign.
In order to become an expert, put out the content that answers the question of your audience. Or much better, ask your audience what are their common queries and answer them.
To Wrap up
The way you choose to get started with your viral marketing strategy completely depends on your audience and their preferences. Moreover while creating any viral marketing campaign do focus on what’s trendy, especially within your target audience.
Moreover, we highly motivate you to learn about the buyer’s persona from our recent article Buyer Personas for eCommerce Boost – 5 Best Ways & 9 Top Secrets. It will help you learn more about how you can get started with your viral marketing strategy and other eCommerce marketing campaigns.