How to Create Viral Content Strategy: Top 10 Tips for B2B Marketers

viral-content-strategy

How to Create Viral Content Strategy: Top 10 Tips for B2B Marketers

Prelude

In the words of Ken Poirot, Author, Entrepreneur & Public Speaker, the initial prerequisites for creating a viral content can be realized in the following quotation:

“The first lesson in constructing viral content is having the strength, courage, and self-confidence to get in touch with your feelings, thinking about what profoundly affects you.”

But why a Viral Content Strategy is required to begin with?

There is no dearth of people who think that monotonous B2B content can’t go viral. At, the same time some people understand that while going viral shouldn’t be the end objective for the content marketers, there’s always a chance that sticking around to the best practices for enhancing the visibility of the content & creating relevant content can make the content go viral at any time.

James Scherer wrote in the Content Marketing Institute:

“If we face the truth, we know that content marketing is about making money.”

Undoubtedly the realm of B2B content marketing is not only fiercely competitive but is also filled with a lot of challenges including optimizing the niche technology & targeting, streamlining the long buying cycles of the prospects & standing out in a market studded with the same high-volume keywords.

In such a scenario “how to make your content go viral” can be a tricky question for marketers to answer. Nonetheless, B2B marketers can benefit immensely from a viral content strategy. Some of the major ways viral content can help B2B businesses bolster include the following:

  • It increases the Organic Influx of website traffic & helps marketers in reaching to a new audience
  • It helps marketers in standing out amidst the clutter of conventional pieces of content such as whitepapers, emails & other online marketing efforts
  • Highly qualified leads can be generated using  a viral content strategy

Viral content marketing has immense untapped potential which needs to be realized, strategized & executed by the B2B content marketers.

Viral content can in created in innumerable ways such as in the form of customer-friendly videos and testimonials & in the form of a standalone edgy content which can appeal to a large number of marketers.

In a recent B2B Marketing Benchmark report by Marketing Sherpa viral marketing was the top-rated social media marketing tactic by B2B marketers. 

Viral content can be created in innumerable forms including the creation of blog content for virility.

In fact, according to a study by HubSpot 55% of marketers stated that blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. Another study from HubSpot implies that one in 10 posts are compounding, meaning organic search traffic for such pots increases over time & its lifetime, one compounding blog creates as much traffic as six decaying posts would. 

A viral content strategy has one secret ingredient i.e. the tendency to get contagious. The viral content marketing is not something that has always to happen by chance. There are ways to entice your audiences in such a way that they feel compelled with your content & act as its brand advocate to finally make it go viral.

A viral content strategy revolves around intelligent & well-structured pieces of content which are the cumulative results of art & science.

In this post, we are sharing 10 tips for architecting a viral content strategy.

1. Create Long-Form & Quality Content:

Several pieces of research have shown that longer pieces of content might aid a viral content strategy. This is so because they inspire greater confidence among readers & entice them for sharing the same.

When it comes to content marketing social psychologists abide by the “Length Implies Strength” philosophy. There is a cognitive biasedness in the minds of the readers that automatically draws them to think of longer pieces of content to be more significant unless they have read the piece of content by themselves. The blog articles aimed towards at least 2,000 words may simply do the trick for you to execute a viral content strategy.

The long-form of the content may stimulate any of the following 3 triggers amongst the potential buyers, which in turn aids to the purpose of a viral content strategy:

  • Talk to the Pain Points of the Prospects:

The marketers should make sure that they talk to the pain points of the prospects & answer the most frequent questions being searched by their potential buyers as convincingly, as possible.

Creating such pieces of content assures that not only the content is popular amongst a niche-specific persona but when these pieces of content are shared they also get an automatic exposure amongst a similar group of persona which may be mirroring the behavior of the ideal persona.

Thus, a viral content strategy can be elicited to initiation.

  • Use persona-specific Targeting:

The scalability of content automatically gets enhanced exponentially when it is targeted to a niche-specific group of prospects.

Marketers need to articulate their viral content strategies & need to make it specific for a cluster-specific group of audiences. Oftentimes, targeting is helpful only segmentation of persona has been properly done.

In an era of omnichannel marketing & Internet of Things (IoT) marketers have an ample amount of data for the creation of viral digital content. To create viral content in the form of blog posts or even for leveraging viral video content, marketers can segment & sub-segment their audiences based on their demographics, technographics, fit-data, firmographics as well as their psychographic behavior & researching habits across omnichannel.

Deploying persona specific targeting assures that the right messages are sent to the right set of audiences to enhance the scalability of content.

There is a strong co-relation between emotions & social sharing. Oftentimes, creating pieces of content that speak to the pain points of the prospects assures that there is a greater likelihood for the content to be shared as is desirable for a viral content strategy.

2. Create Digital Content with at Least One Image:

According to a study by OkDork creating pieces of content with at least one image increases the probability of the piece of content to be shared on Facebook twice as compared to creating a piece of content with no images at all. 

Furthermore, adding images also helps in increasing the sharing frequency of the pieces of content on other social media websites such as Twitter & Instagram.  More often, the viral content examples include the assimilation of images (& videos) in the pieces of content being shared.

Clearly, assimilating visually appealing pieces of content assures that the stage is perfectly set for the execution of viral digital content.

The marketers should also consider implementing the social Meta tags & should add a photo to every post. The quality of images & their contextual relevance determines whether the articles or pieces of content will be read by the users.

3. Try Leveraging the Implicit Emotions & entice Awe, Motivation, Empathy or Humor through your pieces of Content:

When it comes to viral content marketing, nothing can be more rewarding than eliciting emotions amongst potential buyers. Emotions such as awe, laughter, astonishment & amusement are often related to a greater number of social media shares.

Creating pieces of content that appeal to the emotional quotients of the prospects can lay a strong foundation for a viral content strategy to flourish.

According to a study by the New York Times, there were the following main reasons for people to share specific pieces of content on social media: 

  • People prefer to share pieces of content they perceive to be of value to their peers or which they think is entertaining
  • People prefer to share pieces of content that reflects on their personality rather those that might reflect or resonate with their personality traits on social media
  • The pieces of content that help people to stay in touch with each  other & lead to mutual growth or prosperity (on an intellectual level for example)
  • The pieces of content that aid to the inner fulfillment of people  or may motivate them in some way that makes them feel more indulgent with the outer world
  • Pieces of content that speak the causes that the people care about

When enunciating a viral content strategy all the above aspects can be taken care of, keeping in view the value proposition of the products or services in question.

Very often, humorous posts work very well. The real trick for the viral content marketing here is hidden in ways the marketers can use humor to reflect the brand resonance & tell an impactful story resonating with the pain points of the customers, showing the value proposition of products or services, at disposal.

4. Create Viral Digital Content Using Lists & Infographics:

The human psychology is such that we love vorder. Consequently, creating a piece of content with all the essential information may be useful for a viral content strategy, nonetheless, structuring them properly to answer the vital questions being searched for by the users only helps the cause towards a better execution.

Creating Lists (particularly those than include the magic number 10), Infographics, How-to-articles (for example, how to make your brand go viral) & similarly the What posts, Why posts & trying to create viral video content may complement your viral content strategies in ways that have never been thought of before.

Infographics created for showing vital statistics related to particular studies, for example, make it easier to digest a huge amount of information. Also, our brains can easily interpret visual information as compared to the text-based ones. However, the marketers need to assure that the charts & graphs created are clutter-free & don’t have way too much information.

Creating list posts provides the readers with the much-needed synchronicity to digest the longer pieces of content. There should be proper white space in the blogs so that the readers don’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of information on their platter. Even if not using list posts breaking down the information into short paragraphs & using sub-headings & bullets is always a good idea.

If you’re creating a list post rounding the number to 10 is always a good idea.

5. Inspire trust to recipe Viral Content Marketing:

Most people prefer to share pieces of content from trustworthy sources. There should be a byline at the starting of posts & a bio at the end to inspire trust.

Assimilating key insights from diverse pieces of research helps in improving the credibility of the pieces of content & so does the vital pieces of statistics.

Byline & implicit trust play a vital role in improving the authority of the brands on Twitter & LinkedIn.

6. Employ Influencer Marketing:

Influencer marketing not only helps to optimize the Return on Investment (ROI) from diverse marketing endeavors but can also help in positively influencing a viral content strategy.

Influencer marketing is a strong source for driving positive word of mouth referrals (word of Mouth Marketing, WOMM) which can be the ultimate answer to “how to go viral”.

According to a blog post by bigcommerce.com, 89% of the marketers acceded to the fact that ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels & therefore bolstering the ROI from influencer marketing remains a top priority for many of them in the year 2019.

Causing the influencers to share a particular piece of content, making influencers participate in the podcasts authenticating brand equity, creation of the blog posts resonating with the intent of persona with the help of influencers, asking influencers with guest blog for your brand or even asking them for mentioning a particular piece of content in their books or blog posts; may help the brands in speaking with their target audiences in a credible way that might drive a viral content strategy.

7. Repurpose Your Content & leverage its Omnipresence for Viral Content Marketing:

The marketers may never realize when a particular old piece of content, may gain enough vitality to go viral. Therefore, repurposing pieces of content into diverse forms (such as webinars, podcasts, Q&A queries &/resolutions, slideshares, blog posts, news articles, etc.) & distributing them on several platforms across the web may help in strengthening the brand resonance & improving the omnichannel value of the pieces of content for them to go viral.

For more tips on how to repurpose your content to rejuvenate or exponentially increase its relevance & vitality across omnichannel, refer to our blog post.

8. The Magical D-day for initiating a viral Content Strategy is Tuesday:

Tuesday remains the magical day for making the maximum from the content sharing endeavors on the social platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter while Pinterest Monday is often the best day to optimize the social sharing of pieces of content (source: okdork.com).

 Thus, publishing or sharing pieces of content or Monday or Tuesday creates maximum probability to fetch the maximum social shares.

9. Don’t Forget your Niche & Competitive Benchmarking:

The marketers can deploy research, using tools such as BuzzSumo & Mozz to see which pieces of content have been performing exceptionally well for a particular niche, before they finalize the planner for a viral content strategy.

Also, competitively & otherwise benchmarking the industry helps in gaining deeper insights into topics of relevance for executing viral content marketing.

10. Try deploying Viral Video Content & Opting for a data-driven Approach:

According to research by Renderforest, marketers who use videos in their content strategy receive 41% more traffic than marketers who don’t.

While articulating a viral content strategy, videos can’t be counted out of the equation. However, the real aim for marketing while strategizing a viral video content shouldn’t be to go viral but to increase the relevance for a niche-specific audience.

Besides, while architecting a viral content marketing roadmap the marketers should consider the intent-data from the omnichannel digital footprints of prospects.

Data-driven & intelligent pieces content created on the basis of predictive insights gathered from the demographic, industrial & psychographic insights of prospects (both explicit & implicit) can accurately help engineer a viral content strategy, contradicting the common presumption that “how to make a brand go viral” is not in the control of content strategists (which is only partially true).

Wrapping It Up

Whether the marketers want a simple image on Facebook or an infographic or a blog post to go viral or even the viral video content, they need to maneuver a thought process around it. In an era of omnichannel marketing & Internet of Things (IoT) key clues to the virility of content or for viral content marketing can be hidden in digital data spurred across omnichannel.

Technology integrated with empathy, competitive benchmarking & a bit of tweak for test-running & optimization concretes the foundation for a viral content strategy.

Marketers can also use tools for viral content marketing viz. LinkTrackr, Tumblr, OpenLinkProfiler & TrendSpottr for designing & executing a viral content strategy.

Marketers need to remember than the science behind making the content go viral is showing it to be of high value for the target audiences. The posts that motivate the persona evoke positive feelings & induce inquisitively will always have higher probabilities of going viral.

We, at Valasys Media deploy our tailor-made B2B services such as lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services, to help our clients optimize their marketing endeavors towards their core bottom-line goals such as optimized Return on Investment (ROI) or improved customer experiences (CX). For the furtherance of perennially fetching & healthy sales pipeline or for any help with optimizing your B2B endeavors, get in touch with our team of experts.

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