In the world of marketing, recommendations from peers are one of the most powerful tools. As the general marketing trend has shifted to a digital platform, video has emerged as the most popular marketing tool. The traditional concept of word-of-mouth has been replaced by viral video content.
Brands that are successful in creating a viral video become popular among the audience. In a digital world of dwindling attention span, this is an effective way of establishing your brand identity.
Sadly, creating a viral video is tougher than it sounds. There is no foolproof way of becoming an overnight internet sensation, and chances are you might not get viral despite focussing on content creation.
You need to understand that the skill of creating viral videos is one that comes with experience. The more videos you create, the easier it will be for you to figure out what works for your brand. If you are someone who is new to creating videos, here are five tested styles that are known to help videos get viral.
Sleek Palette Videos
Humans are visual beings, and the first look of a video plays an instrumental role in deciding whether the viewer will proceed further. When creating a video, the very first thing that you should consider is the thumbnail. The importance of thumbnails cannot be undermined as videos with an attractive thumbnail are more likely to be shared on social media.
Then, focus on the color scheme of the video. If you have some brand colors, try to incorporate that into the video, as that will help establish brand familiarity. Ensure that there is proper contrast between the background and the font to ensure readability of content.
Depending on the subject, you can take a call on incorporating infographics in your video. Animations, background music, and choice of fonts play an important role in creating the first impression. You must spend time understanding your audience and figure out what appeals to them.
While the basic palate and tone of the video will depend on your business domain and brand identity, it is always a safe bet to go for a sleek palate if you are keen on getting the video to be viral. You can also use an intro maker that will help you stick to a palette and create a poignant start that will keep the user glued for more. There are several intro makers tools available online, and you can make a pick depending on your budget and video editing proficiency.
Influencer Videos
It is a natural human tendency to want to copy people better than oneself. In recent years, influencers have emerged as a new type of celebrity on social media. Each of these influences has millions of followers, and videos shared by them have higher chances of becoming viral.
As a brand, you can leverage this trend by identifying influencers who are relevant to your industry area and reaching out to them for video collaborations. You can consider interviewing them. Since the influencer is likely to share the video of such an interview, you instantly increase the reach of the video to millions of viewers. When some followers of followers share the video, it inches closer to becoming viral.
The key to viral influencer videos is identifying an ideal influencer, deciding on the type of collaboration video, and timing the video well. Every influencer knows the day of the week (and the time) at which most of their followers are most receptive to new videos. If you can time your video release around that, there are higher chances of it becoming viral.
High-Arousal Emotional Videos
People like to share videos that they enjoy. An efficient way of getting people to share your video and make it viral is to increase the emotional appeal of your video. When a viewer connects with your content, they will want others to see it as well.
Evoking emotions of surprise, anxiety, awe, anger, lust, or joy will help viewers develop an emotional bond with the video. It is a general tendency that positive videos get more shares than pessimistic ones.
Thus, while creating a video on a controversial topic has a good chance of becoming viral, the results may not always be positive. It is a good practice to stick to authentic video content styles wherein you take an honest approach to trigger the emotions in a viewer. This style of video-making can be adopted on any subject, thus giving you a lot of creative freedom in establishing a viral digital presence.
Value Adding Videos
Most people have a fascination with looking smart in front of their peers and enjoy sharing content that makes them look smart. As a brand, you can leverage this trend by creating videos that build the sharer’s online persona. Critical analysis of current affairs events, upcoming social events, post-match comments of sports events are some of the topics that you can consider.
While creating such content, try to keep things original and be blunt about what you say. Sugar-coating your words or plagiarising someone else’s ideas will lead you to be taken less seriously. Understand that sharing original content makes an individual look good in front of their peers, and that is why such content has higher chances of being viral.
There is another set of people who are jovial and enjoy brightening the day of others. Such people share positive content with practical advice to their family and friend circle. You can leverage this attitude by conceptualizing happy, optimistic content. Once a video is shared a certain number of times, a chain reaction follows, and your video soon becomes viral.
Freshly Brewed Videos
These days there is no dearth of a video making tool, and anyone with access to a smartphone can create a video. This has resulted in a surge of stale content, and the masses are no longer attracted to it. For better visibility of your video, have exclusive data-driven content in the videos.
If possible, engage in conducting surveys and publishing the survey results as infographics in your video. There are several free survey tools that you can consider for such surveys. While creating freshly brewed content, make sure that you focus on the search engine optimization (SEO) of the video title and description. Try to have closed captioning in your videos to increase their reach.
While the above types of content have higher chances of becoming viral, you need to understand that there is no sure-shot way to viral video content. The content, the tone of portraying it, and the timing are just as important. That is why you must be patient and keep on creating content till you get viral. Experimenting with different social media platforms and cross-promoting your video content is another option that you can consider.
Over time, you will figure out which content style works the best for you. You will also learn about the posting time that works the best for your audience as you figure your way around getting followers to share what you create. As this is a continuous learning journey, there are things that will pick up along the way that will help you establish a viral digital presence.
