https://metricbuzz.com/blog/whats-your-viral-loop/
A viral loop is an online marketing campaign which is used to promote a particular brand, product or service in social media, blogs, and web pages; viral marketing influence the audiences to make them share the content with other people. The viral loop works extraordinarily by reaching millions of audiences in a short span of time; the loop begins when a user start sharing with their friends.
The difference between a viral loop and other marketing campaigns is that the viral loop transforms the audiences into marketers in the social media platform–it allows spreading almost any content among the consumers. The companies expecting to improve their business growth can opt for viral loop as it is an inexpensive, efficient method to cover wide audience without doing much work.
Creating viral loop strategy
To begin with viral marketing, a company should possess the effective product, service or customer beneficial offerings that target the audiences; the success of viral loop also lies in the incentive that attracts the customers and makes them take action immediately. Making the offer simple, creative, and understandable will increase the chances of spreading the viral loop; the most importantly the content should be interesting and informative — the boring viral loop will never make an impact on the customers.
Secrets of viral marketing
The viral marketing facilitates in achieving the business objectives; the viral ads that are circulated online are paid ads backed by a sponsor company which is posted on their own website or social media platforms. The customers who participate in a viral loop will copy the website link or viral ads and pass it via the email, blogs, websites and social media profile page.
The viral loop can be framed using video content, Flash games, images, memes, text messages, web pages, e-books, e-mail and more. Viral marketing is widely differentiated as a trend based, incentive based, pass-along based and undercover based (Source: Wikipedia). The major objective of viral marketers is to create the best viral loops that make the creative viral messages to spread instantly by the customers in major communication channels.
How to design a viral loop? (Source: andrewchen.co)
Many viral loops are being posted on the online media channels that focus on an e-book, product or services, but creating the effective loop still remains doubtful among the marketers. Designing a viral loop is similar to building software, which requires an effectual teamwork that understands the tools and follows the process iterations. There is no guarantee that a viral loop works every time as like the software product which you are unsure about the marketing success.
Viral loops are still not tried by many marketers — luckily if everyone knows to create a viral loop that builds virality in social media, the importance of customers will reduce which may results in lowest response rate to their content. Therefore, the viral loops will be ignored and considered negatively in media channels.
To experience the benefits of a viral loop, it should be built based on their unique product – which cannot be replicated by others unless they are the direct competitor of your product; such viral loop becomes lasting in media channels also effective for the business. The creation of viral loop meets different designing stages that establish the business integrity and builds user distribution.
Step 1: Building framework
The initial stage of the viral loop is to create a fundamental strategy that focuses on your loop–this can be done by identifying how the user can know their products and how they will pass it along with their other audiences. Some of the boring viral strategies followed by Facebook are: find your friends, quizzes and gift feature — these are less accessed by the users nowadays.
Before leveraging the existing viral loop marketing strategy, here are the some of the questions that help you to reach the viral marketing goal:
• Do you believe that your viral loop will suit your product or service which you are promoting?
• Does your viral loop create business value to your firm?
• If your viral loop becomes successful, will it sell your product or bounce back the users when the reach the end point.
Thereby, to make your viral loop effective, it should pass several testing stages for the successful implementation of the loop.
Step 2: Implementation
Successful development of viral loop is most important for the business success; effective viral development may take more days to complete–for the best implementation practice, utilize agile development standards that help you to produce the right features or web pages. To create a best viral loop, it should be strongly focused on your niche; for example, if your video sharing website, you can involve in creating attractive video Likewise, if you are an eCommerce platform, you can involve in offering offers to customers.
In this step, you should gather all your development stages in a single codebase and change the order of pages or page elements; once you complete the viral loop, you can easily modify it in the right way for your business.
Step 3: Reach the customers
One of the easiest ways to multiply your traffic is to pay for the audiences–offering money for each day to build your online traffic will help to improve the level of traffic to your website.
Step 4: Optimize the traffic rate
When you experience the rise in incoming traffic, you can optimize the targeting web page by analyzing it using A/b testing or through Google web optimized tool. The process will help you to identify the value for the money you are spending—more traffic will eventually increase your sales. To perform this process, you should follow the below conditions:
• Reduce the flow of pages that takes the audience to the end point
• Modifying the user interface that takes the user to the next stage
• Testing your page flow in different angles to identify its true value
• Improving the count of people being invited
The enhancement process may take more days than the other stages, but sometimes it may create no interest towards the audiences–as it involves in inviting people more time in a single iteration and performing a less customer-oriented process which may make the viral loop ineffective. After the series of the optimization process, you can either one of the results:
• Failure in reaching goal and traffic
• Reached your goal and higher traffic rate
If you are unable to reach the targeted goal, it’s better to stop the enhancement step because the changes may show very less impact on your metrics. In order to achieve the business value, you should restart the entire process from development stage—the failure denotes that you want to end the optimization or testing process and create deeper features to gain audiences.
Step 5: Refinement
The final stage of the viral loop is to polish it by triggering the following issues:
• Making the viral loop customer-centric in the first place
• Creating the best user experience by removing the inessential page elements
• Integrating viral loop in your product in the right way
For the long term virality, the loop should be customer friendlier; in common, if your growth is higher or lower than the expected, it is the right method to spend more time on the changes to make the loop sustainable for a long time.
What is viral loop expansion?
As email, blogs and social media are popular among the users, customers play a different role in creating the viral loop; the virality is more than making a video spread across the social media. Once a soda maker creates a video to gain attention from customers through reposts, the company made a strategic plan for their viral marketing where they considered the video as one of the elements for their loop. This shows that the viral loop does not only rely on your content virality, it also has a systematic strategy behind it.
How to create viral expansion loop?
You may try different ways in creating the viral expansion loop, but your plan should be centered around the content you are sharing–the content focused on your product or service should create interest to the audience. The base of the viral loop starts when the user takes action on your content as their action may send notifications to others users which drive them to take part in it.
How the notifications can be done
Notifications are the main element of the viral marketing plan; it can be either the automated emails or social media notifications that influence the other users to access it, but organic notifications are the best method to gain audience trust as it allows the users to choose their friends to send the notifications. The conversion occurs when the user signs up or download your product, but it is decided by the quality of the content or user experience.
Examples of viral loop
Quizzes
According to Frac.tl, the quizzes are the great way to create a viral loop as it produces the unique results for different users–some of the personality quizzes gives user-centric results that may trigger other audiences to participate in it.
Buzzfeed quiz had rightly implemented the strategy by receiving 1.2 million likes from the users through influencing them to take part in the quizzes; the main ingredient of their success is they provide the information about the person’s unique personality which also triggers other users to take part in the quiz and share their results.
Mobile apps
As the viral loop starts by creating awareness and interest on one user and they recommend to others when they are aware of the information and interested in it. The loop is named as viral as it spread like the virus from one person to another which continuously reaches thousands of your targeted audience.
According to growth devil, the candy crush game has implemented the effective viral loop strategies which act when the player faces difficult situations in the game; it allows users to get help from friends for extra life or assistance to move forward to the next level. Even though when the user stopped playing the game, they will be encouraged to play again by the new players who are in need of help.
Candy crush also allows the players to invite their friends to start playing the game using an in-game invite screen which automatically obtains the user contacts. A viral loop is one of the inexpensive ways to promote your mobile app – it been best implemented by many companies; if you are not trying it, other companies may implement it to remain competitive in the global market.
How not to create a viral loop?
Circe – one of the new social networking app which created a controversy when it reaches the app store chart across the world; many developers and marketers doubt their achievement– finally, they came to know that the circle had tried a sneaky trick in UX which scaled them so quickly. It occurred when the user chooses to skip in the circle’s invite page, it will not actually perform the task instead it sends push notifications to all your Facebook friends to invite them to download the app. As it performs a trick which is not expected by the users, the customers were unhappy with the application.
Conclusion
A viral loop is a consecutive cycle which occurs when the user views the content and share with others, thereby, the cycle repeats by moving the content from one user to another by sharing and interacting with it.
• The two main characteristics of the successful viral loop are:
• A unique piece of engaging content which audiences can interact with it.
• Content with the right call to action that induces the audience to share it with others.
The viral loop occurs when the user engages with the content to receive the personalized results and then share with others on the social media–it may prompt other users to obtain their own result thus by repeating the same process to create the circulated viral loop.
What's your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption Click To Tweet
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