Viral Marketing 101 – the Playbook for 2023
As performance marketing becomes more uncertain and TikTok starts to lose its arbitrage status, the next big opportunity for startups is organic viral marketing. It’s efficient, it’s data-rich, and it does amazing lift for minimal resources – when done properly.
That’s why I made viral marketing 101. We’re going to correct some assumptions and misconceptions about viral marketing, what it is, and how it’s done. I’m also going to lay out my playbook for developing a repeatable organic viral acquisition playbook for a brand.
“Find the Wave, Ride the Wave,” is a key part of our approach to developing viral lead magnets and organic marketing campaigns. This methodology emphasizes researching and identifying compelling narratives or trends (“finding the wave”) within a target market that the brand or product can naturally fit into.
The next step is to design an experimental acquisition channel (“riding the wave”) through lead magnets or similar initiatives, focusing on organic growth. By acquiring vintages of users through these campaigns, we are able to collect and analyze data, iterating over time to refine the campaign and make it increasingly viral. This approach aims to achieve key business objectives while establishing strong product-market fit through organic channels.
Organic viral marketing can be a powerful tool for acquiring your early adopters, and from moving from your early adopters into the mainstream. When you don’t have years of runway to find product-market-fit, investing in such a data-rich and fast-moving channel can be a game-changer.
I’ve learned the ins and outs of this technique the hard way, and have moved over $100M in revenue while breaking dozens of projects into the mainstream along the way. Now more than ever I feel the need to expose the method so that more startups can feel confident meeting the challenges of the rapidly-changing marketing frontier.
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How to Do Organic Viral Marketing – Snaphustle
If you’re looking for organic viral marketing for your company, Snaphustle is the place to start. If you’re not sure whether viral marketing is right for your current state and goals, read on. I’ll explain what viral marketing is and how we do it.
My team executes our tested Find the Wave, Ride the Wave viral playbook for startups and brands. From quizzes to community challenges to custom gamified user experiences, we go deep to find different viral formulas to test for a startup and their target market. Then we build, test, and optimize it before seeding organically.
Let’s talk about what exactly viral marketing is, before we dig into this methodology more, though.
Viral Marketing – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Viral marketing has upsides and downsides. The upsides are incredibly low CAC, high acquisition volume, and a big boost in brand awareness. The downsides can range from operational stress on your business, to high churn and harmful or low-quality engagement. You must intentionally craft your viral acquisition formula to avoid these pitfalls.
It’s about far more than just “going viral”. One of the biggest misconceptions about viral marketing is that it’s random, or low-effort. The truth is, successful viral marketing campaigns are meticulously designed.
What is Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is a marketing strategy where individuals spread the word about a product or service to their friends and family, creating word-of-mouth organic marketing.
- Viral marketing is a strategy that relies on people to spread the word about a product or service
- The goal is to create a “buzz” and generate a large number of sales or leads in a short period of time
- It is typically achieved by creating a compelling and shareable piece of content, such as a lead magnet
- Partnering with creators and influencers can make the campaign more visible to a larger audience
- Incentivizing people to share the content with their friends and followers can increase the chances of a viral effect
- A well-crafted viral marketing campaign can be an effective way to generate buzz and acquire new customers for a very low cost
How does a “Find the Wave, Ride the Wave” Viral Marketing Campaign Work?
The types of lead magnets we build and run include but are not limited to:
- Quizzes
- Community Challenges
- Social Media Reality Experiences
- Gamified Experiences
The business owns this lead magnet forever. Often times, the lead magnets end up being integrated into product onboarding flows, as they prove to be more effective at pulling people through the conversion funnel.
Each iteration of the Find the Wave, Ride the Wave playbook has a unique snowflake application for each startup. In each project we cover off 3 key bases:
- We research, test and iterate to put our finger on the unique value propositions and narratives that resonate with a startup’s target market.
- We develop an engaging or gamified lead magnet that provides immediate value and self-discovery, and captures your leads while segmenting them with contextually-relevant data.
- We rapidly study different vintages of users via viral acquisition, and observe which segments have higher activation.
Since the playbook is designed to be repeatable, experimentation and testing can continue as long as needed to achieve key business objectives and gather user data. Additionally, each project could have a variety of potential lead magnet / viral concept combinations to try.
If you’re going to invest in developing an organic viral acquisition channel, there’s no shortage of opportunity. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows with viral marketing – there can be serious drawbacks.
Add Nanocreator Digital Street Teams for a Flawless Combo
Using nanocreators in your viral marketing campaign can be an incredibly savvy move. There are many solutions to work with them, but the best one is Snaphustle. Social media gig apps like Snaphustle allow regular people to create content and sell pre-priced one-off partnerships to brands.
This means that your content is not only coming from real, genuine fans instead of paid spokes-creators, but you also get the benefit of them posting their geniune content to their native social networks – the influencer effect.
Here are some reasons why you’ll want to seek out nanocreator partnerships for your viral campaign:
- Nanocreators have a niche and engaged following. This makes them well-suited to promoting products or services that align with that niche.
- They have a more authentic and trustworthy relationship with their followers. Nanocreators have a smaller audience, which can increase the chances that their followers will trust their recommendations and take action.
- They are cost-effective. Nanocreators charge less, which means that they can be a cost-effective option for marketers to use at scale.
- They can help with localized campaigns. If promoting a product or service in a specific area, nanocreators can help you reach that audience.
- They can help you to test a product or service. If testing a new product or service, you can use nanocreators to get feedback and insights from a targeted audience.
- They are easy to work with. Nanocreators are often more flexible and easy to work with, which can make the campaign process smoother and more efficient.
Key Takeaways
- Social media technology means that virality is a new dimension of growth that is accessible to anyone, and can happen organically.
- A potential pitfall for virality is when a brand loses control of a narrative. A news outlet can issue a correction to a piece, for example, but the original news will have already traveled so widely. The correction is not syndicated to nearly as large of an audience in engagement-based feed algorithms.
- Viral acquisition can facilitate massive research and learning. You can identify various personas in your target market, and learn which ones engage the most with your product. You can also see which segments exhibit certain behaviors or require longer activation cycles.