What is Viral Marketing?

As we’ve written before, today’s chief marketing officers are faced with a grab bag of challenges, from old brands that never got traction on social media to new ones that can’t find a way to be competitive.

Agencies are grappling with integrating those new entities—with any influence, cultural norms or historical assumptions—and developing the technologies to solve those problems.

But what about new forms of marketing that can scale exponentially to reach massive audiences? How do you find creative ways to replicate the same ROI scale that brands pay for from the money they spend on traditional media? Are you creating effective digital media and programming that can reach millions of followers and enhance your online presence, and grab their attention through organic growth and engagement?

One brand that is mastering this, at scale, is Salesforce.

The company’s marketing division has figured out how to create a whole level of virality to increase online marketing’s direct and indirect ROI. The most recent example is the Intelligent Streams Marketing Kit, which takes the News Feeds platform, which represents more than 90 percent of the social media and news feed media stream for brands, and creates a connection between the two that turns those big pipes into a communications tool. In this case, data and attention are easier to obtain than ever, and brands can tune their digital campaigns up and down.

This win-now tactic pays off not only because, even though it’s much more expensive to create something new from scratch and present it on an untested platform, brands can easily shift their marketing spend into creating new content through the Intelligent Streams Kit.

Tobacco company TPC International launched in March, with the goal of being the world’s largest tobacco trading company with a global reach. Their marketing team went to Salesforce and worked with the Intelligent Streams Marketing Kit, and now has a reach of 100 million monthly unique visitors.

The fact that with this product, they’re already at 100 million monthly users with no traditional media buys, is incredible. It’s a win-now playbook that has the potential to greatly enhance their ability to engage and monetize their audiences and drive social share.

Agencies have great ways to reduce costs and leverage new marketing technologies and offerings, but Salesforce’s cloud-based Intelligent Streams Marketing Kit can make everything dramatically better—including making your audience much smarter and more engaged.

As for the rest of you, if you want to hit higher goals, find out what your influencers are looking for to build their audience and what is working well for your target group, then do a research drill-down and emulate it yourself. Look for ways to adapt new platforms to your customer’s needs, and automate that in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise, because the best influencers are the people using the platform already. And if you’re an up-and-coming agency, consider taking an engaging digital campaign and applying that method to new platforms like the Intelligent Streams Marketing Kit, to scale social media ROI exponentially.