The great thing about viral videos, at least from a marketer’s standpoint, is that web-based tools make it easy to track views and where they’ve been passed onto. When a video has hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views in a week, it’s easy to get excited.
A smart marketer will tell you that views do not equal brand awareness (or sales) and while they’re much harder to track, offline conversations a video has inspired and even more importantly, an impact on your brand in terms of awareness or sales, could be more important. But we digress... 😉
The overarching thing you want to keep in mind when producing a marketing video that you want to go viral is that, much like a successful Hollywood production, it needs to be compelling. Ask yourself if your video going to have what it takes so that people who are not already fans of your brand or follow your industry are going to want to share it. The number of views you're aiming to receive shouldn't be the end factor in determining success, but if your goal is to create content that goes viral, view count is very important.
When in the planning stages of your video, incorporating one (or more) of the three following elements should help ensure the video gets passed around.
1. The Cute Factor
Some people will tell you the Internet is made for sharing cat videos and pictures. It’s not, but the EDS Super Bowl commercial aptly titled ‘Cat Herders’ netted them more than 1 million views online alone. The most successful of all time? No, but it came out in 2000 and still gets a laugh. The lesson? Cute / animals / kittens / puppies / etc., usually inspire people to share content. And if you're looking for more recent cuteness, the Shiba Inu puppy cam has more than 60 million views.
2. The Compelling Human Interest Factor
Invisible Children’s KONY video has had more than 98 million views, in addition to all the views it received when the major media outlets across the world replayed it. You can read more about it here.
3. The Amazing Factor
Bob Burnquist’s first ‘Dreamland’ episode has some branding in the upfront to sell his sponsors, but it’s Bob’s skating that does the real selling here to more than 2 million views.
It's important to note that the trailer for the 'Dreamland' series this video is a part of, has less than 30,000 views as of the time this blog post was written (September 2013 ) and other installments haven't come close to matching the 2 million mark.
(Disclosure: We used to work with Bob's former shoe sponsor for a number of years and until 2014, represented a brand owned by the same parent company as another sponsor of this video. Bill also skated Bob's Mega Ramp once, but the footage wasn't nearly as impressive.)
Did any of these videos drive sales or awareness? With Invisible Children's, it's a safe bet to say yes. The others, we can't say for sure without having their back-end metrics, but at the least, they've captured attention for a short period of time.
Once that attention is captured, your ability to leverage it should be the deciding factor in judging the success of your marketing video endeavors.