Well if you are reading this then you probably know what a viral competition is but just in case you don’t, a viral competition is a competition spread by the participants. It got its name from the fact that it spreads like a viral infection. Now all of us want our competitions to spread like a viral infection cause then more people will be exposed to it and you come closer to reaching the goals you defined.

Planning

This however is not something you can dream up and create in an evening and hope it will spread virally. You need to plan it carefully. Renier discussed defining goals and strategy for you viral competition in our previous blog post. I would like to delve a bit deeper and help you plan how you will reach those goals.

Defining your audience

Now that you have decided on your goals and the strategy you will be following. To reach these you will need to define your audience. You need to define who you will need to reach so your competition will fulfil your goals? Who are the market leaders and evangelists of your audience?  It’s important that you know exactly what the profile of your audience will be to enable you to target them in the best manner you can.

How to reach your audience

Now that you have defined your audience you need to investigate what channels you will use to reach them. If you where looking at targeting business owners and professionals the channels you use would be completely different from targeting a young professional. Knowing your audience you need to determine which channels online will work the best to target these users. Quite frequently email has been used as the first point of departure with campaigns like these but because of excessive use it has also started losing some of it’s effectiveness. Targeting users on social mediums have become quite a big channel because of the ease of sharing this with their friends.

Tailoring the competition

Your competition will also need to be tailored for your audience. If you are targeting web savvy users then you can add more complex steps to the competition. If your audience however were not power users then it would be beneficial for you if you keep your competition as simple as possible. This isn’t the only factor you should look at though; you will need to look at everything from the design to the language you use to ensure your audience associate with it.

Keeping it alive

Now initially your competition might get a lot of traffic because of all the other marketing initiatives you are running to promote the competition but after that it’s up to you to keep it alive. You will need to plan exactly what steps you need to take to make sure users keep sharing and spreading the word. This could include emailing them reminders, offering another price for the top sharer whatever will appeal to your users and keep it going. You also need to monitor the campaign closely and ensure you can adapt approaches if you see that another approach you didn’t think is having a viral effect.

A viral competition is a very sensitive environment and you really need to plan all your steps carefully otherwise your competition might never take flight and your goals won’t be met. If you have your planning well defined and thought through and you are able to adapt your approach, you should find that your competition should prove to be a very good marketing tool.

Please leave your comments or questions below.