Viral Marketing done well can send your campaign rocketing into the stratosphere so we thought we would look at some of the 3 of the top viral marketing examples that might inspire you to create something special and how they achieved their success.
You might be asking yourself ‘What is Viral Marketing?’, I mean, we all know what going viral means but surely this is just down to being in the right place at the right time? In a way, yes it is. The trick behind successful viral marketing campaigns is either, knowing where and when the right place and time are, or creating something that people want to get on board with.
The Evian Babies
This is a great example of how something so simple can work so well. Personally speaking I couldn’t stand the advert (much like that Charlie Bit My Finger video, I just don’t see the appeal) however over 80 million YouTube views on the original video, almost 7.5 million on the French version and over 21 million in the US version tell a different story. As well as creating an extremely popular marketing campaign on TV it has also, as we have shown, been a very successful digital Marketing Campaign.
The YouTube video is ready made content for Social accounts which will gather shares that convert into followers. The followers that the YouTube channel would have gained also feed into the long game with further videos reaching them directly, leading again to social shares and creating a readymade viral atmosphere that the right content can spark again.
4 years after the original ‘Roller Babies’ advert Evian had more success with the Evian Baby&Me video which has achieved over 110 million views in 2 years. Without the success of the first ad, and the foresight to build around it, it is unlikely this second video could have been as successful.
Old Spice
Another extremely popular viral marketing campaign has been the Old Spice Manly Man. Old Spice was the butt of a few jokes, it was seen as pretty old fashioned and of a different era and they took that on board and decided to use it to their advantage.
Creating their character who was the ultimate manly man from the Ron Swanson school of men and a tag line of ‘Smell Like a Man, Man’ they got straight to the point and cut through a lot of nonsense and people responded to it straight away.
Following on from this they built the marketing campaign around this man and the second advert has now reached over 50 million YouTube Views. In the 5 years since they have kept people engaged not only with more adverts but using the character to respond to comments and news in short YouTube videos. In doing this they kept their audience engaged and haven’t let the character die off.
At the time of writing a new advert, Old Spice | Interruption, featuring both the original character and Terry Crews has just been released. After 16 hours the video has already been viewed 29,020 times. You can click here to see how it has performed since.
Three – Pony Dance
This one really seemed to come out of left field, a mobile network. Over 11 million YouTube views later and it seems to have done the trick. The tagline is ‘Silly Stuff. It Matters. Keep on Internetting’ and it is here you can see the thought process behind it. The rise in internet access through smart phones has made it so much easier for viral advertising campaigns to reach the masses.
Three are currently producing another bizarre campaign featuring a muppet like character that sings and it is seeing a lot of interest online too.
These are just some of the best viral marketing campaigns but there are many more examples out there. Occasionally we will see a gem spring out of nowhere to achieve a genuine viral result but it seems for now we will have to wait and see who comes up with the next viral marketing strategy to really hit home.