MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

What makes a message go viral? More importantly, how can you position your marketing messages to go viral?

Here at MECLABS, we recently had a front-row seat to just how easy it can be for a message to go viral. Senior Marketing Manager Justin Bridegan attended a rally at one of Mitt Romney’s events here in Jacksonville. During a break in Mitt’s stump speech, in which the former governor was attacking Newt, Justin yelled out, “Send him to the moon.”

With that comment, Justin changed the course of history. Or at least had a big impact on the latest message to go viral in the 24-hour news cycle.

Mitt started on to his next point, but then spun on his heels and asked, “What did you say?”

Justin, ever the marketer, sold the line even better the second time, “Send him to the moon.”

With that, Mitt changed the course of his speech to talk about Newt’s moon colonies, and within just a few hours, this interaction appeared on sites from New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and 7,131 other related articles.

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“I never thought what I said would be repeated or shape some of the political discussion or landscape for the day,” Justin said. “Only after posting my video did I realize my comment had been used across the country in many of the major news affiliates.”

“It really comes down to being at the right place, at the right time, and then seizing the moment. Today I witnessed firsthand what real-time marketing means.”

Of course, we were eating it up here in the office every time the quote was picked up in another major news source. (One of our favorites was a comment on a New York Times article claiming Justin was a plant for the Romney campaign.)

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How can you position your marketing messages for virality?

Just like that, with a quick spur-of-the-moment shout, Justin’s message went viral. And that’s just how easy it is.

Deceptively easy. Because, unlike, say, crafting a message in paid media, you have little control over how to get that exposure to your message.

So, I’m not going to tell you how to make your messages go viral. I simply haven’t seen anyone that can force virality. However, here are a few tips to help you at least prepare for that possibility. To remix Seneca … virality is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Get involved in the conversation

If there is anything we can learn from Justin’s experience, it’s that it never would have happened if he weren’t at the rally.

So what does that mean to marketers? As Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” You should be present and engaged anywhere your audience and customers are engaged in a conversation. For some, that is Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. For others, that may be online forums. For a local business, it may mean joining local civic organizations.

Being an upstanding member of these offline and online communities, and being a legitimate part of the conversation, increases the likelihood that the early adopters and influencers will start to spread your message.

But, don’t be a faker and try to force it. Or it could blow up in your face.

Understand the zeitgeist of your audience

That’s a fancy word for saying the “defining spirit or mood.” Being present in the community will help you keep a finger on this pulse. Genuinely serving your audience and responding to their needs don’t hurt either.

And, if you’re really engaged, it will pay off in myriad ways in your marketing. In this case, understanding the hot-button issues to push when creating a message you’re trying to spread virally.

Don’t be salesy

It sure is exciting that your winter whites are on sale for 20% off … but highly unlikely that it is a message that will go viral.

In testing conducted for “Can viral video clips drive targeted traffic to your web site?,” we found that although the 28 video clips we experimented with had no promotional message or content, 1.49% of viewers went on to become newsletter subscribers. In just 60 days, our videos were viewed more than 324,000 times at no cost to us.

The research goes on to recommend, “Be cautious about including commercial or promotional content. The most powerful short videos are those that are purely entertaining. It’s when people click through to your site that the time is right to add your sales message.”

Don’t overlook direct media outreach to help germinate your message

While there is nothing I detest more than the traditional spam press release that jams up my inbox, don’t forget that including digital and mainstream media in your viral campaign can be a helpful tipping point to virality (and, of course, the inverse is true as well – a viral idea can help lead to earned media mentions).

For example, Sunflower Market, an organic foods retail brand, sent branded flower pots to key media contacts six weeks before a store opening (the amount of time it takes a sunflower to germinate, natch) to support a downloadable desktop plant application they were trying to spread virally to promote a store opening.

As a result, they received 1,631,862 media impressions in the Indianapolis area, and beat the opening week store sales forecast by 24%.

Related Resources:

Romney urges sending Gingrich to the moon (good video here of how it all went down … starts about 1 minute into the video)

What do great viral videos have in common?

Social Media Marketing: Viral sweepstakes targeting moms grows Facebook audience 4,488%

Content Marketing: Microsoft crowdsources content ideas with a viral contest for new Windows Phone 7 platform

Along with 45,000-plus attendees, I’m at Dreamforce ’11 in San Francisco this week as a guest of HubSpot. On Wednesday afternoon, I caught a session by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot about “engineering contagious ideas” using social media. You may be familiar with Dan from his personal website, his very popular HubSpot webinar series (including the recent Guinness Book recognized largest webinar ever) or his books such as the recently published, “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness.”

Dan’s talk at Dreamforce was based on his new book and his hierarchy of contagiousness:

• Exposure
• Attention
• Motivation

He broke down each of the three areas with a series of “best practices” myths, and presented the reality based on his research using publicly available information, or metrics on his own online real estate.

For this post I’m pulling one example from each of Dan’s hierarchy zones. Read more…

If you’ve been reading this blog for just about any amount of time, you already know that landing page optimization is an effective way to increase the ROI of your website traffic.

But when most people think of landing pages, they think of pages tied to certain traffic sources. The most popular of those sources are generally PPC ads and email messaging.
But there are a few other opportunities to capitalize on your traffic with landing pages. Take a look at this marketing research chart from Boris Grinkot’s 2011 MarketingSherpa Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:

According to the chart, most marketers aren’t optimizing traffic from:

1. Social media sites
2. Referring sites
3. Organic search

Now right off the bat, you might be thinking that the reason those traffic sources aren’t capitalized on has to do with the fact that most websites aren’t getting traffic from those sources.

However, this data only factors in marketers who have traffic from these sources.

So for example, of the E-Commerce sites that are currently receiving organic search traffic, only 31% of them are capitalizing on it with dedicated landing pages.

The fact that some marketers are dedicating landing pages to these particular sources of traffic is a good indicator that they are working to convert that traffic, but that most marketers are simply missing out.

This one chart signals that there is a tremendous opportunity to get ahead of your competition and start capitalizing on more of your traffic.

Get 41 more charts like this one…FREE

This is simply one insight from one chart in the Benchmark Report. If you really wanted to, I’m sure you could get a lot more out of this chart. You’re only limited by your own business intelligence.

For the next few days, the entire chapter from the Benchmark Report this chart is in can be downloaded for free thanks to a generous sponsorship from HubSpot. All you need to do to get your 41 free charts including Boris’ insightful analysis is click the link below, fill out the form on the landing page, and download the chapter.

Get your free chapter now…

I was impressed by the clarity of the headline and imaging of RealGoodsSolar’s landing page and later provided suggestions for testing their various sources of traffic to build dedicated landing pages for distinct levels of motivation.

Today, I wanted to add one last piece of analysis: the thought sequence effected by the page. “Eye path” is a concept often invoked by usability and user interface (UI) specialists. However, “eye path” is passive. What we want to optimize is the thought sequences in the mind of page visitors to lead them to the desired action, and to do that we must deliberately position content in the clearest and easiest-to-absorb sequence.

The rest of this post is presented in the general order of the expected thought sequence of a visitor to RealGoodsSolar’s webpage. Read more…

At last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit in Boston, we had a very interesting panel of social media marketers sharing their experiences with everything from metrics to internally selling the business value of the practice.

One question that always interests me is…how should marketers deal with negative social media comments, postings, and the like? If you come across negative sentiment that is discovered during listening, or in general any type of negative blogs, blog comments, postings on Facebook, Twitter etc., how should you react?

Here at MECLABS, we follow the credo of Transparent Marketing. Hey, we’re not perfect and we don’t have all the answers. We’re always experimenting. And where we fall short, someone else might have a better idea.

At the expense of receiving a deluge of negative social media mentions, I like (clever Facebook pun intended) when we get some negativity coming our way. The overwhelming amount of social media attention we get is positive. When we get some negative feedback, it means professional marketers are passionately following our content.

And that’s the other thing – its feedback. As I said, we’re always experimenting and learning ourselves. We’re also lucky to have a very savvy audience of experienced marketers. So those negative comments help us decide how to shape our content to most benefit our audience. As I’ve said before, our job is to help you do your job better. When you tell us what you don’t need and what you do need, we get closer to hitting that mark.

(Of course, now that I’ve set myself up for all the negative comments, I also wanted to let you know that you can always give me feedback in private as well.)

Enough from me, on to the experts from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit that were kind enough to share their wisdom… Read more…

Around the MarketingExperiments labs, we are constantly debating the future of Internet marketing. Unfortunately, for the really big picture stuff, our normal answer of “test it” simply doesn’t work. So we’re taking our latest brawl into the streets (so to speak), and asking you to judge what the future holds.

But there’s a bit of a twist. In this debate, we’re forcing our team to take the opposite opinion of what their day-to-day role would suggest. On Friday I must hide my content-creating hat and make an argument for the centricity of technology. But first, read on as Boris Grinkot, a technology (among other things) guy, touts the merits of content. Use our Twitter and comment features to tell us who you think is right.

Executive summary (in three sentences)

The Internet is swarming with content. Technology helps make the content easier and quicker to digest by auto-summarizing, sorting, classifying, or repurposing it in various user-preferred formats. By enabling conversation, technology helps us choose content to consume based on deliberate recommendations or computed popularity. However, technology doesn’t impact content quality. Read more…