How viral marketing works to drive traffic to your site
It’s a nasty way to describe something – “viral”. It makes us think of sickness spreading from cell to cell, person to person, making more and more people ill as it goes around. But when we use the term in the context of online marketing, it’s for a specific (and very good) reason.
If something is viral, it means it can be shared and spread by the recipients. Viral marketing is when an advertisement, video, picture, blog, article (or any piece or shareable content really) gathers popularity and reputation not because of a large-scale marketing campaign or budget, but because the market takes it upon itself to spread the content.
When it comes to website design services, one of the main objectives is to create something that’s going to attract plenty of traffic and be able to turn visitors into customers. Website design these days is all about user experience. To rank well in search engine results, a site has to, above all, provide visitors with relevant, useful content.
Search engines rate a website largely based on its traffic, content and social media activity. Viral marketing provides a brilliant opportunity to score points with the search engines for all three.
Say you create a video (viral content usually relies on pop culture, current events and the existing memes to offer a creative, original and usually humorous perspective) and share that through your Facebook and Twitter accounts. If it strikes a chord with your immediate audience, they’ll use their social media accounts to share the video with their friends and followers. If it strikes a chord with those people, they’ll do the same, and so on.
We’re not saying it’s easy to go viral. To create something that will inspire your immediate audience to share it beyond that is a tricky task – but by no means impossible. Get it right and for a minimal investment of time and money you’ll find your site scoring a big spike in traffic as well as points for original content and strong social signals.
SEO and PPC remain highly important to online marketing campaigns. But don’t underestimate the power of going viral with a clever and well-time piece of content. It’s a great way to boost traffic and build a great social media reputation. Image, video, blog – whatever it is, if it strikes the right chord with people you’ll find your marketing might just take care of itself.
