Let’s start with a riddle: which would you choose?
- A million dollars right now
- One cent today, two cents tomorrow and four cents the next day, and so on for the next 30 days.
Given this is a post about viral marketing and that you’re doing a riddle, you might suspect that option two is the better choice. You’re right, but I bet you don’t know just how right.
Choosing option two would earn you a whopping $9.7 million more than taking the $1 million up front.
And, in this scenario, if you were able to continue doubling your money for an additional four days, you’d become the richest person in the world by a margin of $100 billion. 10 days after that, on day 44, you’d be worth more than the value of all goods and services produced in the entire world.
That’s the power of exponential growth, and the objective of viral marketing.
Viral marketing is a strategy that encourages individuals to share a marketing message throughout their existing social networks – much like they would share a real virus. The aim of this, also just like with a real virus, is the possibility of exponential growth.
What’s So Good About Going Viral?
Corporations employ this strategy for several reasons. It increases visibility, reduces marketing costs, improves search rankings, enhances customer interaction, and establishes greater credibility with the consumer. For many of these reasons viral marketing is particularly effective for smaller brands or companies trying to engage a larger audience with their message.
But with 400 hours of YouTube video being uploaded every minute, 500 million tweets every day, and more than 56 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month, what determines the tiny percentage of this information that will go viral? What is the impetus for people to share one piece of content over another? Understanding the psychology of viral marketing can be the difference between your message going unnoticed and becoming the next internet sensation.
Why We Share
Jonah Berger, a professor at The University of Pennsylvania and the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, has identified six key forces driving virality, under the acronym STEPPS:
Social currency – people want to do things that make them look good.
Triggers – create content that’s easy to remember, and will stay at the forefront of people’s minds.
Emotion – sharing is caring.
Public – when things are more public they advertise themselves; if they’re built to show, they’re built to grow.
Practical value – people share useful things, so create news that people can use.
Stories – people are inherently storytellers and information travels well under the guise of idle chatter.
Each of these steps increases the chances of people talking about and sharing things, and can theoretically be used when creating content to increase its viral potential.
In a recent study researchers Melanie Dempsey and Jason Ho looked at William Schutz’s 1958 theory of interpersonal communication to explain the motivation to share content. The theory highlights three key factors responsible for motivating our interpersonal communication, which are inclusion, affection, and control. Of these, Dempsey and Ho found that inclusion and affection are the key motives for sharing online content. Inclusion addresses our need to be part of a group and attract personal attention, while affection deals with showing appreciation or concern for others. When we share content we are affirming our sense of self through demonstrating our participation and belonging in social groups. On top of this, we are also opening up a communication channel with our social networks where we can connect through a feeling, be that concern, humour, or anything in between.
What Makes Us Curious
We also need to understand what motivates people to engage with content in the first place. One explanation is the information gap theory of behavioural economist George Loewenstein, which sheds light on the human compulsion to take action when we feel a gap between what we know and what we want to know. Loewenstein argues that we want to fill the gap to “eliminate the feeling of deprivation”. The curiosity that arises when we feel this imbalance can drive us to engage more deeply with content. But how do we figure out where the curiosity comes from? Is it a primary drive, such as hunger, or is it a state of being? In any given situation it could be driven by desire for specific information, yearning for knowledge in general, or just an attempt to escape boredom.
From A Neuroscientific Perspective
Another possibility is that the power of curiosity lies in the pleasure that comes from forming new ideas. New ideas occur in brain synapses when connections are made between seemingly unrelated data. Neuroscientists explain that the more randomly connecting the data is, the more synaptic play occurs, and the more creative joy you feel. The combination of two trending yet unrelated concepts is clear in a lot of viral content; from kitten-saving firemen to rollerskating babies. The curiosity in the novelty of this content, combined with the creative connections that it inspires, could be a big factor in its success.
The More We Care, The More We Share
While there are numerous theories unpacking the psychology of how viral marketing works, the common denominator between all of them seems to be emotion. As Jonah Berger agues, “the more we care, the more we share”. In a recent study by Fractl, it was found that certain emotions were more viral than others, the top ten being amusement, interest, surprise, happiness, delight, pleasure, joy, hope, affection, and excitement. The bottom line is that if you can get your audience to emotionally engage with your content then they are more likely to both read and share your message.
Manufacturing Viral Content
Berger recommends a balanced focus between technology and what you’re doing in the real world. He argues that some people are spending too much time trying to manufacture viral content that has nothing to do with the brand, and reminds small businesses especially that good old fashioned word-out-mouth allows your customer base to organically evolve into your marketing department. However, whilst understanding the psychology viral marketing doesn’t guarantee that you will engineer virality, it can certainly go a long way to helping your content infect the masses!
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing refers to any marketing activities that aim to organically spread a message from person-to-person in an exponential-like fashion.
Viral growth is organic as it spreads by person-to-person sharing, not continued marketing on your end. The goal is to create something that people want to share.
Exponential-like because true exponential growth (the mathematical kind) is impossible. But, no worries, a growth rate 100 times slower than true exponential growth would still create the most successful marketing campaign of all time.
How to Go Viral
There are two main types of viral marketing: inside-out and outside-in.
Inside-out viral marketing is built into your product or service. The idea is to create something that becomes more valuable to each user as more people begin to use it.
The classic example is the telephone: the more people who have phones, the more people you can call, so the more valuable a phone is to you. If you have a phone and no one else does, it has no value whatsoever because you can’t call anyone.
A more recent example is smile at world , a new way to give to promote their business that uses inside-out virality to help anyone make a huge impact for on customers. You can choose any products/services you care about, and thanks to viral marketing, make a bigger impact than you ever thought possible.
Outside-in viral marketing is about doing marketing that connects with people so deeply that they want to share it. It can be done by any individual, cause or company.
Here’s a great example. In 2014, a young man named Pete Frates was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. A born leader, Pete soon wanted to know what it would take to cure the disease.
“One billion dollars.”
Pete was up for the challenge. He ignited a movement of people around the world who would dump a bucket of ice-cold water on their heads, donate a little bit to the ALS foundation, and pass it on. In the eight weeks following, the Ice Bucket challenge would raise $115m to fight ALS.
Two Viral Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
If you don’t have inside-out virality (most companies don’t), your only choice in viral marketing is to create an outside-in campaign, like the Ice Bucket Challenge. And frankly, a truly viral marketing campaign, one of Ice Bucket level growth, is immensely difficult to do and depends just as much on luck as it does on skill.
So, are small businesses hopelessly left out of the viral game?
Nope! You can take advantage of viral marketing in any type of business of any size. Here are the two easiest viral marketing techniques for small businesses.
1) Run a Contest or Giveaway
Contests are an easy and effective way for any business to dabble in viral marketing. Here’s how to create your own free contest:
- Choose prizes. If giving your product or service away for free works as a prize, that’s perfect! Otherwise choose gift cards or prizes somehow related to what you do.
- Define your goal. What do you want people to do? Share a post? Take a picture? Use a hashtag? Follow you on Twitter? The key is to choose a goal that only asks people to perform a simple task that that they already know how to do.
- Share. Once your contest is set up, share it with the world. Post on your website and all social channels. If, like many new or small businesses, you don’t have a very large following, you might look into using Facebook ads to promote your contest.
Example Instagram Contest
Many Clothing business frequently run Instagram contests that allows people to win various picnic-themed dresses as prizes by sharing photos from picnic events and using their contest hashtag: #Picnicoutfit
Example Viral Video Giveaway
A US-based Hospitality Group used to run yearly win a wedding contest that asked soon-to-be couples to create and share a video about their dream wedding. The winner used to get prize money toward their wedding. The contest started to catch up and at one time they were receiving more than 50,000 yearly submissions.
2) Set up a Referral Program
A brick and mortar business can start a referral program in less than an hour. Here’s a simple framework for getting started:
- Choose a reward. Gift cards are perfect. Choose an amount that makes sense for your product or service. If you sell $10 widgets, it doesn’t make sense to offer anything more than $1, so a referral program might not be right for you. But if you sell $10,000 events, you can offer a $25, $50 or even $150 referral reward and still make plenty of profit. The aim is to balance profit with the incentive for referrers.
- Update your website. Add a page to your website that explains the program and allows to report people they have referred. You should also add a field to your contact form along the lines of “How did you hear about us?” and include an option for “referral”.
- Side note: this is also a great way to start tracking your leads.
- Tell your customers! If your customers are used to receiving email from you, you might try an email blast. At the very least, add a new blog post and share on your social channels.
- Pro-tip: add a link to your new referral page in your email signatures.
Software or ecommerce companies must use a different strategy that allows for automated tracking of online referrals. The good news is that nowadays even those with limited computer skills can set up an online referral program in a few hours thanks to referral software.
Example Referral Program
Check out this simple and effective referral page from DROPBOX Dropbox – They Up to 32 GB per referral. I bet you can set up a similar but small version referral program which could be effective to your Business.
How to Apply This to Your Business
Any business of any size can take advantage of viral marketing, the simple ideas I covered in this post are just the start.
I hope reading this post has inspired you to think of a few ways to bring viral marketing into your company. Remember, a simple referral program can be set up in less than an hour. Give it a try, there’s nothing to lose!