20 Steps: From Video Marketing to Viral Business Branding

So you have created a great video for your viral marketing campaign, now how do you make it a successful business branding technique? After all, generating leads and sales is the aim of every marketing campaign and that is surely what you want too. Here are 20 steps with which you can make your video marketing campaign a complete success:

1) Define a Target Audience

Every marketing strategy starts by defining your target audience. Create a profile of your target audience based on demographics, behaviors and lifestyle. For example, Dove is targeting females of the ages 15 to 35, who are conscious about their skin and are interested in the concept of natural beauty.

2) Build Your Audience

You need to take out the time to build a community of your target audience that you want to aim with the viral video. It’s not about just making a good video it’s about getting it to the right audiences.

3) Give Back

Consumers like a brand that gives something back to them as well. So position your campaign to make them feel that the brand will also give them something in return.

4) Find the Influencers

The World Wide Web is full of millions of communities. Identify the ones that compose of your target audience and win over the people leading those communities. To make a video viral on the web you need to have support of all the mediums for maximum reach.

5) Choose a Suitable Medium

Making a viral video is just half the job. You need to identify what are the mediums most accessed by your target audience, if they are mostly present on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plurk or Youtube. Be diverse and tap into all the right mediums. Instead of marketing everywhere choosing the right mediums has more effect.

6) Seed Smartly

Every video sharing website has different audience that it appeals to. Make sure that you use the right video sharing website appealing to your target audience.

7) Think Deep

You want to think deep and make personal contact with your target audience. The aim is not to reach all the networks possible. A guided campaign is important to get your video on the most viewed list of videos.

8) Mass Personal Contact

Now you must be wondering that this step is probably wrongly written. How can personal contact be done on a mass level? We are talking about viral branding here and the internet makes everything a reality. The campaign has to matter to your audience, they are human not machines. So develop a thorough marketing campaign that will spread like a virus from one fan to another. It’s just a matter of finding the human touch.

9) Make People Talk

Get as many people as you can to talk about your viral video. Ask your fans to share it on their Facebook profiles, ask them for feedback, ask them to follow it on Twitter, get them talking. The more they talk the more successful they will make our viral campaign.

10) Keep Talking

Promote you viral video through whatever mediums you can. If your company is participating in a charity show, tell people about the new viral video or even better share it with them. Don’t stop talking about it.

11) Pay Attention to the Audience

You need to pay close attention to your audience. Listen to what they are saying, read the words in their emails and even hear their silence. Study them so closely that you know what will persuade them to convert to your brand.

12) Use Artificial Ears

Use the internet to keep feeding the audience with the latest update through methods like email alerts, search results, RSS feeds and so on.

13) Get on the Most Viewed List

You want your video to get on the most viewed videos list on the networks that it has been uploaded to, like Youtube. Use optimization techniques to make this possible.

14) Title Optimization

People search for videos using keywords and phrases. Identify your right keywords and phrases and use them in the title to optimize it for search results. People may watch millions of videos on Youtube; they will never spot yours if it can’t turn up in their search result.

15) Thumbnail Optimization

Your video may be turning up in the search results, but what makes a user click on it and view it. Use interesting thumbnails and titles to capture the eye of the internet user.

16) Be Subtle

Marketing videos need to have an element of entertainment in them. That is what makes them interesting to watch by the audience.

17) Don’t Spell Out Everything

Let your video do the talking. You don’t need to spoil the point by pronouncing it for the audiences. Let them perceive and interpret the message of the video themselves. Just like Dove’s video for their ‘real beauty’ campaign shows an average looking woman being turned into a billboard model for a cosmetic brand.

18) Hook Them Up

Hook up your audience to your brand. Use interesting logos, taglines and jingles to support your viral video. Make it look delicious to your audience and get them hooked onto your brand. Like in Dove’s marketing video discussed earlier, they only made one small statement near the end of the video saying, “No Wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”. One solid statement to get the audience hooked.

19) Measure Everything

Every day, week and month watch the progress of your viral video marketing campaign. Identify the patterns and discuss strategies for improving its impact. With constant monitoring, you will be able to identify any problems and correct them before they have any serious impact.

20) Talk to Your Fans