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You’ve probably heard the term “viral marketing” more than a few times in the past. It’s bandied about enough these days. It is an extremely important and highly viable means by which you can actively engage an audience well beyond your own. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to know when a viral marketing concept will actually be successful. It might take multiple tries and repeated trial and error to be sure something will work.

What is Viral?

The idea behind viral marketing is quintessentially a marketer’s wet dream. You create a single marketing campaign - something simple and intriguing. That marketing campaign carries enough artistic or entertainment value on its own that your product has very little to do with it. The entertainment factor causes people to share it with as many people as they can and so on until thousands or even millions of people have seen or read what you produced. A great example is YouTube. Essentially every video that gets more than 10,000 views on YouTube is a viral video that benefited from word of mouth.

If you can tap into that market and create a product that reaches the far corners of the World Wide Web, you will gain a loyal following of people who want to know more about the band that created such an interesting piece of pop culture.

What Do You Make to be Viral?

When you create a viral marketing campaign, you must abandon all pretenses about your music and your band. The primary focus is creating something fun and interesting for the largest possible audience. Of course you want to integrate your music or your band into the product in some way, but that should be secondary to the idea you develop.

A series of short 3 minute webisodes posted on YouTube is a great example. They might show the life of your band off stage in classic mockumentary style or they might be a showcase for goofy antics you have developed. Other bands have created websites with free music and no band name, building a solid buzz behind nameless music before releasing their actual album with their band’s name attached to it. Personally, I like this campaign by L.A.’s A Cursive Memory.

The ideas that people have developed are countless, utilizing as many creative and outlandish methods as possible to create buzz before anything else. Word of mouth and buzz are the most powerful marketing tools you can tap into. If you create the right degree of interest in a product, it will not matter if people even know who you are - they will want to know more about the video, blog, or website you created. Think virally and you can create a whole new level of online success.