Viral marketing campaigns are tough to generate but rewarding for restaurants. Creating buzz for a brand, restaurant, event or menu item that resonates with customers can generate exponential referrals and sharing through social media. Restaurants realize many benefits by joining social networks and cultivating groups of people with strong networking skills to encourage viral marketing.
Engineering viral marketing campaigns offers virtually delivers benefits for minimal costs for restaurants, bars and hospitality companies. Viral messages, ads, images and videos persuade customers and followers to share with their friends, families and work associates. Restaurants can generate massive publicity when their campaigns get shared exponentially.
The benefits of viral-friendly marketing campaigns include increasing brand awareness and focusing attention on restaurant milestones and events. Other advantages of these types of promotional strategies include:
Restaurants can use either a guerrilla or professional approach as long as the campaign uses creativity and emotion to grab attention and become a focal point for sharing and conversation.
The guerrilla approach to marketing seemingly throws away the rulebook by using nontraditional advertising forums, outlets and stunts. For example, using graffiti to advertise is a form of guerrilla marketing. Instead of creating an integrated advertising strategy, guerrilla viral marketing focuses on a specific demographic group to impress them, usually by using edgy, creative stunts and placing ads and messages in unexpected places. Ads might be ephemeral and appear in parks, streetscapes or temporary forums like flash mobs, raves or performance-art happenings. Restaurants that have used guerrilla marketing successfully include:
The professional approach often uses the social media to interact with consumers. Professional viral campaigns can inform people about a restaurant’s accomplishments, cooking techniques and charitable works and generate publicity for a cause, event, product or culinary style. Often the content is transferred into an innovative format such as a cartoon, a hashtag etc. Restaurants that have used professional viral marketing successfully include:
Emotion fuels viral campaigns, even the professional kind. Restaurants and customers who favor a professional approach do so because they value professionalism or knowledge and rank these types of campaigns higher than catchy ideas and trendy points of view. The first step in crafting a viral marketing campaign is identifying whether to take a professional or guerrilla tack.
Each campaign can target a different demographic segment and use either approach. Hitting people hard with emotion, nostalgia or humor attracts their attention. Writing a compelling title helps to attract viewers and gets people to click on links.
Surprise, anticipation, curiosity and astonishment work particularly well in viral marketing. Admiration of local heroes or people who have overcome adversity generates strong social and word-of-mouth sharing. Creativity, humor and big publicity stunts work especially well when branding a restaurant that attracts younger customers and trendy crowds.
Marketing has shifted from speaking at consumers to interacting with them. Viral campaigns basically say, “Hey, have you heard about this? It’ll really impress you if you think like we do.” Originality, surprise, delight and other emotions grab people’s attention.
Customers and viewers will do the heavy lifting by spreading a restaurant’s message to a broad group of potential customers. Viral campaigns reach a restaurant’s targeted audience almost effortlessly when the message is on-point, and remarkably original ideas can even cross to mainstream audiences and reach tens of thousands or millions of people.
Photo Credit: “Buzz Words Show Publicity And Viral Hot Topic” by Stuart Miles from freedigitalphotos.net