Viral Marketing
enspire | Viral Content Discovery & Creation Services
The Importance of Viral Marketing Online
As social media and networking dominate the online landscape these days, the importance of viral marketing and social media efforts within your SEO campaign cannot be understated. Viral marketing online is essentially the act of attracting awareness through creating original, engaging content for the web. While this can include various forms of both interactive and static content, targeting a specific, niche online audience with the power of influencing others, via shared content or links, is key to success with a viral marketing campaign. Shared content that is considered valuable to a specific subset of users online is in return shared via natural links through news outlets, forums, blogs, and other active members of online social communities. With the core strategy and goal for SEO being to increase your value within search engines, linkbait, or viral marketing content provides an accessible and effective technique to increase exposure to your product, service, or cause.
A study conducted by Forrester Research via the Groundswell Blog shows us that in just three years there is up to 50% more users active in engaging social media content. These numbers show us the importance of social media in the future as well as the potential and relevance of viral marketing campaigns for businesses both online and off.
Leveraging Social Media Outlets Online
The online world of viral marketing really revolves around social media, its contributors and creators, and those influencing the process. Since increasing site traffic, backlinks, and overall brand recognition are typically the main goals of viral marketing, leveraging social media outlets online is vital. While blogs, forums and audio/video hosting sites have remained the focus of these campaigns; a new generation has brought inventive formats for sharing content online that provide unique opportunities for viral marketing. The potential of leveraging innovative social media trends such as bookmarking and sites revolved around user voting shows us the future of viral marketing.
Increasing Brand Awareness and Online Visibility
The principles behind increasing brand awareness and online visibility with viral marketing are quite simple. At their core, search engines are designed to operate by determining the most relevant and valuable content online for any given search term or phrase. However, the way in which search engines are able to do this is by essentially analyzing links and the patterns of users that use them. Linkbait, or quality viral marketing content is precisely the type of data search engines thrive off and look for. By simply creating this content and leveraging social media outlets to share it with others, you are directly telling search engines this information and the links within are valuable. Essentially this provides search engines with the type of data it needs to be more accurate at finding content users are interested in sharing and as a result your content will be considered more valuable than conventional web content. Basically, viral marketing content shared through popular networks and communities does a much better job of making itself visible as quality content to search engines.
The Added Benefits of Viral Marketing Campaigns
Even those who are not familiar with the process of viral marketing realize that it simply makes good business sense to have as much exposure as possible. The fact is creating a presence online is much easier than ever before thanks to our ability to market a product, company, or cause efficiently through social media outlets. By far the biggest benefit you will experience from a viral marketing campaign is increased exposure. The more valuable content that is shared virally, exposing or promoting your business, means the more incoming links, and in return, increased site traffic.
…
