Viral marketing is the practice of encouraging people to share a brand’s content, message, product, or experience with others. It can extend a campaign’s reach, but no dependable formula can guarantee that it will go viral. A useful strategy is to make sharing worthwhile and easy, choose a measurable business outcome, and weigh the possibility that a provocative idea may alienate people as well as attract attention.
What viral marketing means—and what it cannot promise
A viral campaign spreads when people pass it through their own networks, giving a brand reach beyond the audience it could address directly. Shares may be driven by humor, usefulness, emotion, identity, a compelling story, or an incentive. Those motives can be designed for, but the result is not fully under a marketer’s control.
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In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti wrote: “Reliably designing messages to exhibit viral properties is extremely difficult, it turns out, as is predicting which particular individuals will be responsible for spreading them.” That caution remains important: a campaign can be thoughtfully built for sharing without promising a viral outcome.
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Jonah Berger’s STEPPS framework offers six lenses for making an idea more shareable. Treat them as questions to test against your audience and goal, not as a recipe. The USC Annenberg case study of Ithaca’s tourism campaign applies these principles to a real campaign.
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- Social currency: Does sharing this make the person seem informed, funny, generous, or part of a community they value?
- Triggers: Is there a memorable cue or recurring moment that will bring the idea to mind?
- Emotion: Does the content invite a feeling strong enough to motivate someone to pass it along? Humor is one possibility, but it is not the only one.
- Public visibility: Can other people see participation or recognize the product in use? Make the share action and its result easy to notice.
- Practical value: Does the content give people useful information, advice, or a resource worth sharing?
- Stories: Can someone retell the idea as a simple, engaging narrative while the brand message remains part of it?
Shopify’s guide to viral marketing also points to humor, reversing expectations, collaboration with trusted creators or brands, and knowing the target audience. Those approaches are options to evaluate, not guarantees of reach. A collaboration, for example, is only helpful if the partner’s audience and credibility fit the message.
What the Ithaca tourism campaign shows
The Ithaca Convention and Visitors Bureau used a winter “surrender” campaign, drawing on a humorous, reverse-psychology premise to share positive messages about local businesses. The USC case study reports a 20% increase in Facebook likes during the campaign year and identifies Facebook as the leading influencer in referrals to VisitIthaca.com. The bureau then remarketed to newly acquired contacts with a warm-weather promotion.
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The campaign also drew objections from local tourism stakeholders who disliked its message. That tension matters: attention and audience growth are not the only outcomes to assess. Before using provocation or a joke, consider how residents, partners, employees, and customers could interpret it—and whether the attention is worth the risk to those relationships.
Build a story people can follow
Story structure can give video viewers a reason to keep watching and share what they saw. MarketingSherpa reported on research by Keith A. Quesenberry and Michael Coolsen analyzing 155 viral marketing videos against Freytag’s five-act structure. In that set of videos, those coded as having four or five acts averaged more than four times the shares of videos with zero to three acts. This is a finding about the videos studied, not proof that longer videos or a particular structure will produce the same result for another campaign.
A separate example in the same MarketingSherpa report, published March 15, 2021, describes a 2018 Moriarty’s Gem Art video about a glowing Hyalite Opal. The business connected the stone’s unusual appearance to Kryptonite and brought in a radiation expert. The report says the video received more than 3 million views in its first few weeks and 5,323,222 views after three years. Those figures are reported for this business case; they are not an independently audited benchmark or a forecast for other campaigns. The example illustrates how a distinctive subject and substantial effort can earn attention.
Make sharing useful, visible, and low-friction
A campaign can encourage sharing through a product’s natural use, an easy referral path, or content people want to pass along. HubSpot’s examples include Loom making recordings easy for users to share and LawnStarter using shareable lawn imagery to build awareness. These examples, relayed by a marketing publisher, show why reach and purchase conversion should not be treated as the same result: content may support awareness or consideration without directly producing a sale.
For a referral offer, explain the benefit and the steps plainly. Then look beyond the reward amount. A 2018 academic preprint, Going Viral: The Epidemiological Strategy of Referral Marketing, discusses incentives alongside ease of participation, forgetting, reminders from peers, trust, and brand value. A larger incentive alone does not address a confusing process, a lack of trust, or a product people do not value; nor does participation by itself establish sustainable growth.
Choose the outcome before choosing the tactic
Viral attention can be measured in several ways, and one metric cannot stand in for all the others. Decide what the campaign is meant to achieve before launch, then connect the sharing mechanic to that outcome.
- Awareness: Track relevant reach, views, or engagement, and define which audience you need to reach.
- Referral visits: Measure visits arriving through referral sources or campaign links. A referral source can show influence without proving that a visit became a customer.
- Sign-ups or sales: Track completed actions tied to the campaign, not just clicks or shares.
- Longer-term customer relationships: Consider whether participants return, remain engaged, or recommend the business again; an initial burst of attention does not establish lasting value.
When comparing campaign ideas, ask who the channel reaches, why that audience would share, how much effort and trust participation requires, what outcome is intended, and who could be put off by the message. The examples above report different measures—Facebook likes, referral influence, video shares, and views—so they do not provide a controlled, like-for-like ranking of tactics.
A practical campaign planning sequence
- Set one primary outcome. Choose whether the campaign chiefly aims to build awareness, bring referral visits, generate sign-ups, or drive sales.
- Define the audience and context. Identify who is most likely to find the idea relevant and where they are likely to encounter it.
- Choose a sharing motive. Use STEPPS to test whether the idea offers social currency, a trigger, emotion, visibility, practical value, or a story. Select the motives that fit rather than forcing all six.
- Remove unnecessary friction. Make the content or referral action easy to understand and share, and consider whether participants trust the brand and value the offer.
- Check stakeholder and reputational risk. Consider how the message could land with customers, partners, employees, and the wider community before publishing.
- Measure the intended action separately from attention. Compare the campaign’s reach and sharing with the visits, sign-ups, or sales it was meant to produce.
Further reading
For a deeper treatment of the STEPPS framework, Jonah Berger’s book Contagious: Why Things Catch On is relevant further reading; the USC case study attributes the framework to Berger and applies it to Ithaca’s campaign.
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