Lizz Fransen’s Online Marketing Blog

With so many videos being uploaded to YouTube and other video websites each day how do you get your video noticed so that it spreads the way that you want it to? There are two components to making sure viewers pass on your video, content and promotion.

Just like in a television ad, people watching are more connected to viral videos that elicit an emotion with them. This connection is what prompts the viewer to forward the video on to their friends and family in order to share the emotion with them. The blog entry “The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement” explains how different emotional reactions can work for different campaigns depending on their target market. The element of surprise is important in all viral videos as it wakes the viewer up from a “lean back” state that videos promote to the normal “lean forward” state of the internet so that the video will get passed on.

The idea that viral marketing is an easy way to advertise is becoming a thing of the past as videos have to compete with not only other viral campaigns but also videos that are posted by users without a marketing agenda. Viral campaigns need to be effectively seeded and marketed in order for people to see it and spread it to others. The entry “The Secret Strategies Behind Many ‘Viral’ Videos” on the blog TechCruch was posted by guest blogger, Dan Ackerman Greenberg, about his work promoting viral videos. Some of the tips he gives for getting your viral video noticed might be considered unethical, such as paying people to embed the video on their blogs and creating a controversy using different usernames in the comments in order to get more buzz. These techniques and others can be used to get your video noticed more effectively than seeding it alone by taking advantage of the systems YouTube has in place.

Viral marketing creates better brand awareness as viewers become advocates for the video, and by extension the brand, through sharing it with others. This can make the technique as beneficial as word of mouth referrals providing that the video is well suited to the brand and the viewer easily makes the connection between the two. The “Viral Video Marketing Budgets To Increase” entry on the Viral Blog looks at a survey identifying that more companies are increasing their spending in this area in order to produce and market videos that will spread effectively through their target market.