The Ins and Outs of Going Viral as a Small Business
Going Viral: The Mixed Blessing for Small Businesses
A video going viral in marketing talk is a sudden spike in demand that is unexpected and not necessarily sustainable. The reality is, all of your social media content as a business should have a twofold intent, one of them always being sales. It is important to have in place a plan for unforeseen marketing success, such as a video going viral, that can either take your business to the next level or completely ruin your reputation as a brand.
TL;DR: 3 Quick Tips To Increase Your Chance of Your Video Going Viral
- Have a strong, consistent presence on the social media platforms where your ideal customer can be found.
- Viewers are interested in your authenticity, vulnerability and the story you are telling, not necessarily the quality of your video.
- Turn new customers into lifetime customers with creative ways to continue simplifying and adding value to their lives.
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Video marketing for small businesses begins with taking a step back and looking at where your business should have a presence when it comes to social media platforms. Knowing which platforms are being used by your ideal customer is key. It is better to have a strong, consistent presence in a couple of platforms where your ideal customer is than a mediocre presence across 5 or 6 platforms. Having a presence on any social media platform that is not consistent will not help your business grow on that particular platform.
“If you’re going to be on a social media platform, you’ve got to do it right,” – said Tatiana McDaniel during a #BizHackLive webinar.
Quick Tip: For businesses new to social media, you might find that the exact username or “handle” that you are looking for is taken, it is okay to add a couple of words before or after your brand name such as, official or the real. Keep your handles consistent across all platforms. This makes it easier to recognize your brand across the board.
You also want to make sure you have in place your standard operating procedures (SOPs). SOPs are a way for you to systematize your marketing and to make a small team be able to achieve more. You can think of SOPs as the guidelines of every single thing that you do in a business, like a recipe. They are your how-to’s of getting from one point to another to accomplish a goal or task.
At Happy V they created the “response matrix” for customer service. The response matrix says every time they get a question about X they will answer in one of three ways. You want to have a document like this for your team when video marketing your small business and are dealing with potential customers. This way you can ensure consistency that creates credibility for the brand and a quicker process for both parties. Creating these documents that explain how to do every part of your business is critical for growth.
Is Tik Tok the Right Platform for Your Business?
Tik Tok is a short-form video-sharing app that is taking over the space and is well known for its viral videos. It is all about storytelling in a very condensed amount of time (10-15 seconds).
Tik Tok is also very much appealing to the younger generations which is something that you as a marketer of your own business needs to be thinking about. Being where this younger audience is, is very important for many businesses.
Brand Video Goes Viral, Now What?: A Case Study
Tatiana spent more than a decade marketing top brands at advertising agencies such as Y&R and Zimmerman. Last year, she went in-house for the e-commerce brand Happy V, a brand that offers a wide range of natural, clinically proven women products, where she has experienced a crash course in building up a brand with limited resources during a global pandemic.
Her team made the marketing decision to get on Tik Tok. Happy V was only on Tik Tok for a couple of months before having one of their videos go viral and reach over 15K followers.
Happy V received over 600K views on only their 5th post on Tik Tok. It was a social media video marketing piece in a storytelling format with the goal of selling products. The video went viral and caused their entire stock of Happy V products to sell out almost overnight.
When it comes to social media video marketing, you want your viewers to enjoy the video, relate to it, and take action.
Happy V saw an increase in website visits the next day by 50% and there was an instant increase in sales on their Amazon page with a few hours of what seemed to be a sale every 5 minutes. Their goal was to get the products out and shipped as quickly as possible no matter what.
They had all hands on deck on the packaging line, including employees with no packaging experience. They knew they were bound to have errors. There were customers who received the wrong products, the wrong number of products, and so on. For all the customers that they did receive their orders incorrectly, they apologized, offered reimbursements, and sent them a complimentary product.
Creating Lifetime Customers
When your video goes viral, the most important question is, you got the customer, now how do you keep the customer? Simplify their life and continue to provide value. Think about creative ways to keep your new customers on board. Happy V provides their customers with a subscription program that replenishes their products on a monthly basis minimizing the headache of continuously having to remember to replenish their product.
How to Handle Going Viral As a Small Business
As a business, the first challenge with going viral is you’ll get a spike in demand that’s not necessarily repeatable or predictable. See it as a one-time windfall rather than something you can bank on.
If you are successful in your social media video marketing and you sell out, you have a really big marketing challenge because you need to make sure you don’t alienate all these new people who are super excited about your brand, who are encountering it for the first time, who’ve made or want to make this purchase, but they also want it right away.
With unforeseen circumstances, it is important to be completely honest and vulnerable of your situation with unsatisfied customers.
“The value of keeping that customer who on that first encounter with the brand may not have had the most seamless experience, that’s everything. Even if you have to reimburse them and let them keep the product, that’s a decision that you make as a business owner because of the lifetime value potential of that customer,” said Tatiana.
Tip: Customer service IS marketing. Customer feedback will give you ideas on how to run your business better. Even if you are a small team you have to be in communication with your clients on your social media platforms.
Video Marketing for a Small Business: Done is Better Than Perfect
Organic image/video posts to your Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook accounts are more of a time investment, you are not paying the platform to promote it to a certain audience. Happy V’s viral video took about 4-5 hours to create, that was their investment (along with a couple more hours answering all the questions in the comments). The challenge for a marketer is you have very little control and you rarely have a sense of when it is going to go viral.
It is important to note that, “Perfect is the enemy of the good,” Dan Grech, our founder and CEO said during the webinar. The quality of your Tik Toks doesn’t really matter. Viewers are interested in your authenticity, and the story you are telling, nothing else.
Tik Tok is a technology that has several components, but like anything new, you just have to get in there, mess around with it as much as you can, and you’ll start getting the gist of how things are done. To begin video marketing your small business, script a story that you want to say and get it done, it does not need to be perfect. Think about what story you want to tell and what you want the customer to take away from that story.
“What we are seeing now in social media is more appeal towards vulnerability and authenticity,” said Tatiana.
As your brand grows you are going to want to aim towards perfection, but when you are starting out nobody has the time to record a Tik Tok video 17 different times until they get the perfect shot, especially you’re the CEO and all other heads of a business (Happy V’s viral Tik Tok even misspells the name of her own company!).
Video marketing for a small business can be a huge investment of your time with little guarantee of success. If you have a strong sense of where your ideal customer is on social platforms, play around and create videos on those platforms that share your product/service stories in a vulnerable, authentic way. Make sure to have a strategic plan in place for what comes next because your video might just go viral.
