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Viral mobile campaign recipe

On 11th April 2013

Blood, sweat and… luck?

You would like to make a viral mobile campaign, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t every brand want at least one? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be as easy as one would think. Many may think viral mobile campaigns happen by themselves. They don’t. There’s a lot of hard work and planning involved, and even that won’t guarantee success. Seems like you need some luck as well.

We can’t help you with luck, but we can tell you how to do everything else.

Is it viral material?

Not all campaigns are suitable to go viral. Some just don’t have what it takes. That’s why the first step is to set the objective of the campaign and then see if it has the potential for a viral campaign. If the answer is yes, you may proceed with the following steps.

Start with an investigation

Who is the target group for your campaign? What are they like? What do they like? What will make them share your campaign? These are just a few questions; surely you’ll be able to think of many more. The answers will help you in forming the idea for your viral campaign.

The “easy way”

The easiest way to entice sharing is to create a contest and make sharing the part of the content itself. However, the best medium for viral campaigns seems to be video. It is important you make the campaign (video) accessible to everybody. Don’t ask them to leave their information before they view the content, or offer to download something. Everybody should be able to access it with a simple click or tap. That means you need to optimize it for mobile as well.

Beyond sharing

If the goal of campaign is not simple branding, but you want users to actually order, purchase or leave information, make sure they can do so easily. If you create a landing page, have two versions: desktop and mobile. And keep it as simple as possible.

Plan for seeding

Seeding is the process of getting your content shared. That’s the part that’s the most important, isn’t it? But it won’t happen by itself. You have to make it happen. There are two ways to do it:

  1. Pay for placement on relevant web sites
  2. Outreach, meaning find influencers in the community and get them to share your content with their followers. But beware, you can’t just send them a link and expect them to share it for you. You need to create a relationship with such people first, and then, maybe then will they share it. If it’s worth sharing, that is.

Make it worth sharing

We have finally come to the most exciting and the most challenging part of creating a viral campaign. The content. It should be unique, entertaining, shocking, emotional… as long as it’s worth sharing. Let’s look at some examples of successful viral video campaigns and try to extract a few general rules.

Make it fun

You probably heard of “Will it blend”. This success story shows how to make a regular household object and add that certain something that will make it go viral. The company states that the campaign significantly boosted sales as they made a series of short videos blending the craziest things. They included the audience and started blending “on request”. Here is a video of them blending an iPad. Crazy, right? Yeah, crazy and viral!

Snag a celebrity

Turkish Airlines made a fun commercial with Kobe Bryant and Leo Messi. The video got 103,928,574 views. Check it out yourself:

Make it current

T-Mobile may be the king of viral videos. They really know how to make one, and they have the necessary budget. This video of a real life game of Angry birds has 16,899,062 views on YouTube, and it’s really fun!

Make it emotional

T-Mobile rules here as well. Their Welcome back flash-mob does a great job in invoking emotion. You probably already saw it, but here it is anyway, just because it feels good inside every time we watch it.

Make it cute and emotional

And the best way to do it is to use children or animals. Volkswagen nailed it with this adorable little Darth Vader and snagged 57,144,711 views on original YouTube clip.

Make it unique

This video is simply exceptional. Nice, catchy song, cute characters, and by the end, when you realize it’s an ad for Metro, you simply don’t care. You just share it!

Get viewers involved

Old Spice made a great commercial. You know the Old Spice guy. But they didn’t stop at that. They got their viewers involved with a highly interactive video follow up. Here’s the whole case study:

Final pointers

First, make the sharing process as easy as possible using social networks and e-mail. Include share buttons.

Second, listen to the feedback from the community. If it works, that’s where you’ll get pointers how to create a follow-up. If it fails, they’ll be the first one to tell you why.

Finally, use the right keywords and tags. And that’s about it. Good luck. And you can always count on ClickAttack to help you with your campaign placement!

 

 

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