Viral Ad Network

Here’s a few quick tips to maximise the effectiveness of your Viral video campaign.

Bigger isn’t always better.

People have a short attention span online, so keeping your video short is the best tactic. By all means have a long version of the Viral that the most engaged viewers can seek out, but use a concise version to take to the masses. We reckon a minute is a good target to aim for.

Be entertaining / interesting

If your content interests people, they’re far more likely to keep watching and ultimately engage with your brand. Seems obvious, but it’s amazing how many people will create a ‘viral’ that is actually just a dry sales message. Whilst this approach can work for TV advertising, online viewers will just stop watching if they aren’t engaged. Online video campaigns generally work better for branding campaigns rather than explaining your newest product’s features.

Start with a BANG!

Get your key message across in the first 10 seconds of the video. People will make up their mind pretty quickly if they are gonna keep watching, so its key to grab their attention from the start. You should also plan for a drop out towards the end of the video.

Leverage the Love

If people have enjoyed your video they will be more open to engaging with other marketing content. Include a call to action at the end of your video – drive traffic to your FB page, YT channel or website. You can also offer a click through link in the video description (or as part of the VAN viral player)

(image via http://thingsthataretotallyawesome.wordpress.com/)

Using social media as a channel for your marketing is almost a given for most brands now; video advertising on Youtube, customer service via Twitter, branded Facebook pages, etc.

I’d like to show how social media can complement Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing strategy. I’ll break it into the same four stages of:

1. Making friends
2. Changing your friends to customers
3. Maintaining customers
4. Changing customers to brand ambassadors

image by TracerBullet999 on Flickr

Part 1 – Making Friends

At the Viral Ad Network, we often find ourselves helping brands try to make friends. Making friends can be quite literal and measurable (i.e. adding to a brand’s Twitter / Facebook following) or can be a more abstract objective to develop a willingness in someone to engage with a brand’s content and conversation.

Much like in real (offline) life you need a reason to engage with people you don’t know. But first you need to decide who you are trying to reach?

You should research and determine what groups and niches are valuable to your brand. Where do you want to interact with them? Do they have any awareness or preconceptions that you need to consider? You can monitor the buzz around your brand using online tools.

Next, you must consider what is it that you want from this group?

You are (at this stage) just trying to make friends with your target audience, however you must think about your long term relationship. How do you intend to change these new friends to customers? What sort of voice is your brand going to use with these friends? There’s no use in approaching people on a comical, lighthearted level, only to ditch that as soon as you have their attention and ‘friendship’.

So, what does your marketing offer them?

You need to have a reason for people to listen or participate in your social marketing campaign. Your brilliantly shot and well edited infomercial may sum up your brand perfectly but if people don’t want to seek out this info, it will not be of interest to them. For them to engage with you there needs to be some benefit to them for listening. This can be in many forms:

- You can entertain them (for example, creating a viral video) ;
- You can solve a problem they have (for example the excellent myskystatus.com); or,
- You can offer them something of value (like Groupon).

You should also consider how will you quantify success of your campaign? Are you after a number of views on YouTube, Twitter followers, Facebook likes or another metric?