How to make a viral video
Nov 19, 202015 mins read
Viral content is extremely coveted, but making your videos go viral is not a simple feat. Gone are those more leisurely days where a great video can run viral on its own without much effort. With the massive number of videos uploaded daily on YouTube, Facebook, and other video sites, how can you make yours go viral?
Highly shareable content can provide your business a pull, drive new leads directly to your site, and boost conversions. Therefore, producing a viral video, however, is far from easy. Once your content goes viral, it is like winning the lottery. It’s amazingly tough to accomplish and often difficult to replicate. For each viral video success, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of failed attempts.
Marketers valued the impact of their created video to become viral because a lot of people see it, and it can possibly reach their targeted audience quickly. So what is viral marketing, and how does it work? Before we proceed on principles, technical keys on making a viral video, let us learn the definition of viral marketing to better view its importance to marketing and other promotional purposes.
What is viral marketing?
The exploitation of digital media and online social networks increases brand awareness and recognition of other particular sales, marketing, or publicity goals. The word “viral” defines how a message can become self-replicating as it is accumulated and shared across the Internet.
Viral marketing controls the Internet’s power by classifying and producing a marketing message to online communities and people with a high Social Networking Potential (SNP), believing that the message will be shared and spread. Anything that hits a chord with many people with high SNP to pass it along to others can go viral. Viral marketing improves the possibilities of a message transpiring viral by intentionally and strategically promoting a message.
With the right marketing strategy and application of modern technology to share your video globally, it can significantly increase your video’s chances of being viewed and shared. The efficient word in all successful viral campaigns is “shared.” The more your video is being shared, the higher chance it will progress viral. Always think that the word “viral” indicates self-replicating. If people are not spreading your video, it will never indeed go viral.
Simple Rules On How To Go Viral
1. Target Your Audience’s Emotion
Know the most powerful emotion your targeted client will respond to and draw into it. Before you can build pieces that are sufficient to become viral, you must first recognize to whom it is intended. Your target audience is the fundamental demographic who typically purchases your product.
People will not react well to your videos if they’re well-made, but they’re dry and appear too operational. They desire something emotional but not excessively sentimental. Whether it’s hilarious, sad, inspirational, or driving, emotions keep the solution to taking people to sit and watch your video over. People like to become emotionally endowed in a story; if they can associate with it, it’ll give an enduring mark on their memories.
Marketing campaigns that communicate your brand’s story while also offering consumers a sense of emotional connection with you are excellent ways to drive them to share your content. You can draft an emotional copy that gets your audience feel sentimental and happy, or you can generate videos that trigger your audiences’ emotions and direct them to take action.
2. Tell It With A Story
Have you ever wondered that the most popular ads are those videos that are like mini-movies rather than commercial ones? That’s because our sensory cortex has this impact to react more when a story is being told, according to a buffer blog.
Storytelling is one of the greatest techniques to involve people with your brand because it encourages them to associate with your message and hold them from getting back for more.
It’s challenging, but it’s also an excellent way for you to see how to maximize your time. Consider some of your favorite commercials. It’s incredibly likely that they have a basic narrative structure even if they’re only twenty or thirty-five seconds in length. People will be searching for this same thing when they go on YouTube or other social media platforms for video. They require a short, short story more times than not.
3. Original Content Always Rules
The first and conceivably most significant thing that you can do is to produce some original content. Your business undoubtedly has a particular niche, and that niche might be finance, pets, electronics, or it could be just about anything.
You have to understand when you start applying video ads; there are millions upon millions of content hours already existing everywhere on the world wide web. Not only that, but more is being built even as we speak. It would help if you came up with some genuinely original ideas having to do with your niche. That’s going to be complicated.
You can determine whether your idea is original or not to type keywords having to do with it into the YouTube search bar. If you come up with keywords that match right into whatever topic you’re deciding to make a video about, and you’re not getting much, then you understand you’re on the right track. You’ve acquired a domain of your niche where there is fresh potential.
4. Increase Your Engagements Artificially
We must understand that we cannot push people to watch our videos without them to decide for themselves unless they see it with lots of views, which will trigger their curiosity.
This procedure might be optional, but boosting your video’s views, likes, and reactions artificially can be of help. Though it is a delicate procedure, you can achieve if you follow the right steps. You require a blend of two things, an incredibly compelling video and buying views from a company that offers them. The impact is that once people interested in your niche start viewing your view numbers rise for one particular video, they’ll aspire to watch that video as well.
But you must understand that if the video for which you purchased the engagement is not enticing, those who watch it will be frustrated. Of course, they won’t tell their friends about it, and it won’t go viral. So the quality of the video itself must be amazing.
By combining these ideas, you can get that extra consideration that propels a video into the digital world.
5. Choosing The Right Keywords
Another rule to ponder to help your video go viral is to use the right keywords in your title and description. You must conduct thorough research and understand which keywords people are searching for to use for your video. When it comes to generating videos for YouTube and other video platforms, you need to sort out what keywords you can use to make your video rank higher in search results.
Your brand’s video optimization is not the moment for guesswork, but it requires good research. Begin your search by understanding deeply into keywords associated with your business and brand. You can use tools for evaluating keyword potential. In just a few simple steps, you can have comprehensive information on keywords for your videos.
Remember that while video platforms are amazing, it cannot browse audio within a video for keywords and phrases. So adding it in the context of the content surrounding the video or the description is your best option.
The value of ranking keywords cannot be stressed enough like YouTube as it uses ranking to discover which videos rank at the search engine results page (SERP). The number of views, length of watch time, ratings, and comments are critical components to perform the ranking game.
6. One Video Should Never Be Enough
In order to have continuous success, you need to have more than one video in your box before starting a viral video marketing campaign. If someone notices the video you are advertising and likes it; they may search for related videos from your company.
Every video should be customized to your company and should embed a link to your website or other contact details for them to reach. Do not drop interested viewers hanging because some will Google your company to learn more and how to contact you.
Venture to launch your campaign with four to six videos and add to your video collection over time. If you only have a single video, don’t try to get it viral until you have more because one video clearly shows you are just not equipped yet. If you don’t have time and support to make more than one video, you apparently can’t handle multiple calls a day.
7. Utilize All Social Media Platforms For Promotion
Once you’ve created and published your video live, you are required to use all of your social media platforms to promote and let people know that you have new content. Conceivably, you already have fair followers on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn, so your supporters will aspire to watch your video right excitedly.
Social media marketing provides a huge advantage brand as well as aiding you to produce a viral video. It is the best way to make your video reach more people apart from the existing followers or subscribers. When it comes to managing social media marketing to boost your video, you must do it rightly. For example, Instagram has a wonderful feature called stories where you can even incorporate a swipe up link to your video. But you must understand that it has a guideline and that you need to learn how to use the correct video size and format for Instagram to have a superb quality and outcome.
Utilizing Instagram stories to help your video is more helpful than embedding it, driving onto your Instagram feed. It is because you can’t add links to your Instagram inscriptions. Instead, you can place the link to your video in your bio, but applying Instagram stories is the best way to give people instant access to your video. On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter are a bit easier to advertise because you can post the link to your video without any issue.
Do Not Forget SEO And The Technical Basics
- Search engine optimization is very important if you want to accomplish the best results from your video production. According to a report, 38% of users who searched Google are assisted by videos in Universal search engine results.
There are several ways to optimize your video’s content, and below are the most essential:
- Title optimization
- Thumbnail optimization
- Keyword-rich description, relevant text in web pages alongside the video and captions
- Obtain quality links from websites to your videos
- Create a video sitemap and submit it to search engines
- Include links and enable URL crawls in your robots.txt file to your video sitemap
- It is important and a must to consider the file format of your video content. Some video publishing sites will not take .MSWMM files or the default Windows Movie Maker file extension. You will require to produce or transcode to one of the following formats in order to be compatible with most of these major video publishing sites:
- .mp4 (ipod/psp)
- .avi (windows)
- .mov (mac)
- .flv (adobe flash)
- .mpeg
- Windows Media Video (.WMV)
- .3gp (cell phones)
- .mkv (h.264)
You mustn’t repeatedly transcode file formats because every time you compress from one file format to another, it will imperceptibly degrade your video’s quality. It is also worth noticing, for video SEO goals, that Google usually crawls on the following video file types:
- .mpeg
- .mp4
- .mov
- .asf
- .ram
- .rm
- .wmv
- .avi
- .flv
- .mpg
- .ra
All files should be available via HTTP. Metafiles that need a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported by Googlebot and will not get indexed.
- Never forget subtitling and captioning your video. Many would miss this part because they do not know the significance of subtitles and captions. But with today’s technology and viewing habits of people, these on-screen texts are the most valuable element to have your targeted audience fully understand what you want to promote or what you want them to learn from your content.
Some tools automatically generate video subtitles almost instantly nowadays. If you opt for manual subtitling can cause so much effort, time, and money. Learning how to auto-generate your video subtitles can be very easy. We have many auto-captioning tools, but you must also consider the quality outcome it can provide.
Besides making your audience fully grasp your video message, subtitling and captioning are well recommended for search engine ranking. Google crawlers cannot read speeches, but rather the text copy embedded on the video.