Digital marketers today are doing everything they can to improve the reach and content of their business. Recent studies have shown that content marketing is more than three times more likely to generate leads than paid search advertising, and that eighty-one percent of B2B companies have a blog to improve their content marketing.
With so much content floating around the web, it can be difficult to get potential customers to pay attention to your brand over others. Luckily, there are some fundamental practices you can use to make sure your content has a strong “viral” appeal to consumers everywhere.
There have been countless studies done to understand why content goes viral and businesses can take advantage of this new research to highlight their brand in effective and critical ways.
- Your content should focus on unique and distinct features
- People are more inclined to share emotional content
- Create narratives wherever possible to connect with readers
Here are 4 methods to create viral content more frequently for your business.
Find Unique Selling Points
When selling your product online, you’ll want to emphasize the most unique and remarkable selling points at your disposable. Humans love to be liked and gain the respect of both their peers and authority figures, and one of the most effective ways they do this is to discuss remarkable aspects of their lives. This logic transfers naturally to your company and products.
If you can find selling points that put your product in a remarkable and unique light, people will be far more likely to interact with it and it will capture their interest at a greatly increased rate.
Things which are “remarkable” are far more likely to be brought up in conversation than those which are mundane, and if your customer base and potential clients can view your product as remarkable, you’ll find that spreading positive word of mouth will never be easier.
In order for them to view your product as remarkable, you must focus on features which are surprising and distinct to your brand; comb over your product and its features and select one or two which no other company can boast. If done correctly, your products will be seen in a whole new, positive light.
Focus On Emotion
Focusing on facts and logic are great for debates and scientific discussions, but your job, at the end of the day, is to sell a product and make sure that product is thoroughly planted in the minds of the public. To do this, you’ll want to de-emphasize facts, figures, and statistics, in order to focus more keenly on the emotional response your product or service invokes.
This may seem counter intuitive, as facts and figures can help demonstrate why your product is more likely to help your customers than your competitor’s but spewing out facts rarely changes people’s behavior.
Media saturation is a very real phenomenon, and the general public is unlikely to see your brand in a personal, engaging light without an appeal to their emotions. To drive action and change people’s actual, concrete purchasing behaviors, you’ll want to create and drive campaigns which are focused on the emotional changes people can expect when they use your products or services.
In addition, you can achieve an emotional response by participating in social listening to gauge what your customer base and potential customers are most passionate about. Take their responses and build a campaign around them to build excitement and see real change in relation to your business.
All Information Should Be Practical
If you want your campaigns to be shared and viewed among a large swath of the general public, you should take care to make every piece of information you put forth practical. Boring, meaningless facts and figures contribute to the apathy discussed above but writing content which focuses on what’s going on now, at this very moment, will be far more likely to be shared than writing about less urgent and current topics.
You can recommend services and products in your industry based on shifting trends and lead your customers to other great businesses which aren’t in direct competition with yours. Providing great, actionable, practical advice which actually works in the life of one customer will make that customer more likely to share your blogs and articles.
To fully take advantage of this practice, you’ll need to keep your content to the shorter side and take care to tailor your content toward your customers, offering information which is highly relevant to them and those they know. Your content should be cutting edge and up to date with the latest trends and news coming out of your industry at the current moment.
Offer A Story
Human nature is finicky; people don’t think in terms of pure information and patterns. Rather, they think in terms of narratives, trying to further their own biases and opinions by creating stories around the information they read and digest. While life would probably be easier if we could objectively swallow all of the information we read, it’s just not possible.
Your marketing strategy shouldn’t try to push against human nature, but flow with it. Your content should often center around stories and narratives to wow and excite your audience, stories which they feel should be shared to their friends and families. Stories are far less likely to sound untrustworthy, which makes subtle selling points toward your business much easier and likely to be accepted by those reading the content.
These stories can focus on anything: a success story about a client, a story about a customer’s life made easier, even a story about an employee which empowers and warms the heart of your readers. As long as you’ve created a narrative, readers will be more likely to engage with the content and pass it around their social circles.