Everyone always wants to go viral. It’s like a marketer’s wet dream.
Ya that’s right. I said “wet dream” on my blog.
But it’s true, isn’t it? There are millions of articles, videos and podcasts all claiming to know the recipe for “viral success”. And I’m just going to add another piece of content to the chaos that already exists.
In this episode, I share a few principles that can help you develop better content with the potential for getting press attention, and as a result, get you closer to your viral goals.
I say a “few” principles, because it was hard to remember all of them.
How to Create Viral Content
When I first joined Venngage, I had the goal of trying to increase some brand recognition to Venngage, but also wanted to boost our site’s authority.
I know that driving high quality press links to the site would assist me in this goal. So, we started to try and reverse-engineer what type of content was most likely to get covered by news sources.
We managed to produce some pretty successful content, some of which generated thousands of backlinks, and others which drove thousands and thousands of referral sessions overnight. I’ll list some of the examples in the resources section below.
Tip 1: Solve a Burning Problem
This tip addresses the importance of identifying common issues your audience is struggling with and providing simple solutions to achieving those problems by discovering possible narratives from sources like user calls, or support tickets you receive from your audience.
Formats like studies, or surveys are methods that you can use to solve burning problems.
Tip 2: Provide a Hack to a Common Struggle
Piggy backing off of the idea of solving a burning problem, is finding hacks to common struggles. The idea here is rather than addressing a very major problem, you are simplifying something relatively minor, but extremely common.
Content that uses this principle, often find a simplified and structured means of addressing that common struggle. Think of something like “folding a T-shirt”. Not necessarily a major issue, or one that we even put a lot of thought into, but it’s something we do all the time.
Video’s like this one have millions of views because it provides these little life hacks to situations the majority of people on the planet can relate to.
Tip 3: Mashup Trending and Evergreen Topics.
The next tip covered is about mashing up trending and evergreen topics. What are the similarities that you can identify between something everyone is talking about now vs. something that a few people are always talking about.
Usually talking advantage of current pop-culture trends is a good way of using this principle, and applying that to something relevant to your industry. At Venngage we did this by sorting different tech companies into their relevant Hogwarts houses based on their company culture. You can check out the full post here.
Learn about more principles for viral content:
Naturally, understanding everything in this video is a bit of a challenge. If you’re interested in learning more about viral content from a less inebriated Nadya, make sure you check out my webinar on the 12 Principles of Viral Content.
Resources mentioned in this video:
Content Marketing Institute’s Benchmark Study
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2019_B2B_Research_Final.pdf
Venngage Viral Content Examples
7 Essential Design Principles We Can Learn From Star Wars [Infographic]
12 Principles of Viral Content Webinar
https://venngage.com/blog/viral-content-webinar
Marie Kondo
https://konmari.com/