Category: Viral Marketing

With so many content marketing tools available to us, it’s hard to determine which ones are worth your time and budget. Sure, you could spend your precious time looking through Google or browsing articles on SEO, social media, and content marketing, but you should keep in mind that, this all-consuming behavior isn’t the way to create the highest-quality and most optimized content.

People often tend to) think of SEO and content marketing as being different things, but they actually share similar goals. No matter the tools you use, they all come down to ensuring that your content is consumed, sharing and making that content go viral. Like another once popular strategy called “Pay-to-Play,” but for content marketing.

The exact definition for this strategy is relatively simple: Paid media companies buy and sell advertisements to increase the volume and credibility of content in search engines, so search engines rank those materials higher in rankings.

If we were to use that analogy for content marketing, then it’s a bit like a marketing campaign that wants to go viral. What often happens is that once a campaign runs its course, the content is taken down until a new campaign is rolled out.

In a paid strategy, this program occurs online and online-related content is promoted and circulates to as many eyeballs as possible.

For instance, if you were going to send text and images to people via text message, you could use text messaging or social media channels. In return, you receive email permission to send more content. Or you could use social media platforms to send content to people, they could share it and receive new messages. Again, you earn back email permission for creating more messages. Or you could buy a text service, and send texts to whoever you want.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram essentially become content hubs for brands. They have their own sections and visual vocabulary, which can include pictures, short videos, and more. This gives companies as much control over their content as possible, but in a slightly different type of way. Instead of being restricted to posts that need to be delivered as text messages or broadcast through Facebook, you can create, sell, and pay for as much content as you want for those specific platforms. This will still involve using paid campaigns, of course, but you can control exactly what you want to communicate to your users and why.

And the creativity goes both ways. Why use only text and pictures when you can create a video of your own? Why keep an image-free home page when you can create a splash page complete with a VR journey? Why have a home page that is bland and boring when you can create a vibrant and vibrant way to connect with your target audience? Why make your website white-space-y when you can add rich HTML and provide it to your visitors as a great place to grab a product? Why paint a color palate that you think your audience would love when you can spend a little extra and really use color to create a joyous experience?

In marketing, it’s all about having control over your message. It is possible to control the popularity of your content, but not the quality. So don’t believe that to be the case for content marketing.