Viral Video Marketing: Make Your Mark On The World

Read Time: 4 minutes

What’s the secret?

To begin, if you are looking for a sure fire way to make a viral video sensation, I hate to tell you that there is none. The big secret behind viral videos is that there are no big secrets. Thinking you’ll find an answer is like expecting to read an instruction manual on how to win the lottery… Sure there are a few tips you can pick up here and there, but any major success will most likely be attributed to accident or luck- “The right place at the right time”.

With that being said, there are definitely things you can do to up your chances of maximizing views on your video, and, who knows, if you are one of the lucky few you might be able to compete with the likes of Justin Bieber or Gangnam Style for over 1 billion views!

Powerful Message That Reaches A Wide Audience

If you want to maximize the views on your videos make sure to center them around a message that appeals to a wide variety of people. Logically the wider your audience the more views you will get, and even if your message, or product, is specific to a particular audience, try and creatively weave others in. For example, let’s say you are a company selling pre-natal vitamins. In this case your audience is pretty limited, however, try shooting your video from the perspective of the father-to-be, which will widen your target audience to include men as well. Little tricks like this are always a good tool to use, and can really pay off in the end.

Grow your social media following

This one should seem fairly obvious. If you want to get maximum exposures on your video you should utilize your social media influences in any way possible. Share, share, share your video on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, and whatever else you can think of, and do it oftenly. Social media is an extremely powerful resource so use it to your advantage. Investing time in growing your followers on these various networks is also a very good idea in terms of maximizing exposure. Take a few hours a week and really spend some time growing your network. We know you will thanks us for this advice when your video hits over 100,000 views!

Make the Video Short

This is a very consistent tip that I have run across in most articles I’ve seen about viral videos, video marketing, corporate video production, and so on. Humans, by nature, don’t have attention spans that last very long, so the shorter your video, the more chance it has of going viral. If you are like me you like to throw in a ton of information for fear of forgetting anything, so the excercise of fitting all that you can into a clip of 30-45 seconds will really train you in terms of weeding out non essential information. Our rule of thumb is to pack a good punch in 30-90 seconds. If you can do this you are already one step ahead of the game!

Shock Value

Don’t be afraid to push the envelope with your videos. If you really think about it, most videos that go viral have some kind of shocking WOW factor. Playing it safe is boring, and people tend to gravitate towards things that shake up the “politically correct” balance. I remember reading one article in Tech Crunch that went so far as to say that if all else fails add in a sex factor. That usually resonates with audiences! The Kmart commercial uses this exact technique, and we think it worked very well for them! They pushed the boundaries and ended up with over 17 million views!

Title Optimization

The title of your video is the first thing that people will see. If it isn’t a good one they won’t waste their time. You want to capture your audience’s attention before they even click that start button, so don’t neglect putting in good time to come up with an “out of this world” title. Push the boundaries here too. Key words and phrases like “why”, “you’ll never believe”, “please”, “top”, and so on are great attention catchers, and we suggest trying them out in some of your titles! See how it goes!

Try out some of these tips on a video of your own! Animation is a great, innovative tool to create potentially viral videos so Sign Up for a FREE account with Powtoon now!

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Jordana Pepper

Powtoon's Social Media/Online Marketing Manager extraordinaire who loves to provide the Powtoon Community with amazing, fun, engaging, and informative content!