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MA in Advertising Strategy & Planning Students Create Viral Campaigns by Stepping Out of Their Comfort Zone
Advertising Strategy Pros Know What Works for Their Audience
Grads with an MA in Advertising Strategy & Planning Need to Ensure Viral Campaigns are Ideal for Online Sharing
For many advertising strategy professionals, getting a campaign to go viral is the ultimate goal. Viral campaigns gain brands incomparable levels of visibility, increasing audience engagement and often resulting in unprecedented demand for their products and services.
Viral campaigns come in many forms. In recent years, everything from traditional advertisements, to social media posts, to one-off publicity stunts have experienced viral success, rapidly spreading through online networks and becoming ubiquitous almost overnight. Some were humorous, while some were more serious and focused on good causes or important social issues. Others, meanwhile, were so unexpected that most advertisers might never expect them to work.
While there is no specific formula for viral campaigns, advertising strategy professionals can still improve their chances of success by focusing on a number of key areas when planning their initiatives. Read on to find out more.
1. MA in Advertising Strategy & Planning- Students Create Viral Campaigns by Stepping Out of Their Comfort Zone
To go viral, advertising strategy professionals need to be ready to take risks, and step outside their comfort zones to create campaigns that feel fresh and different. Some of the most successful viral campaigns in recent years have succeeded by including elements that wouldn’t normally be part of traditional advertising, such as user generated content or interactive public experiences. A good example would be this pre-flight safety video from Air New Zealand, which was part of a clever cross-promotional campaign for the film The Hobbit. The video amassed over 12 million online views, generating publicity for both the airline and the film.
Check out the campaign here:
Your MA classmates can offer unique perspectives about your work and open your eyes to new promotional ideas.
Students might well find valuable inspiration through networking with their online masters degree in advertising classmates. Since MA students come from a range of professional backgrounds, they can offer different perspectives about your work, opening your eyes to new promotional ideas and helping you transfer techniques used for different sectors, products, and services into fresh new settings.
Viral campaigns often incorporate unusual elements, such as public events
2. Advertising Strategy Pros Know What Works for Their Audience
While most students pursuing their MA in advertising strategy & planning will understand the importance of knowing your audience, this becomes even more crucial when attempting to launch a viral campaign. Tapping into your audience’s unique motivations and tastes can be the key to generating winning ideas. You might think of content designed specifically for a social media platform popular with your target market, an offer that would appeal to them, or an ad campaign that resonates with their sense of humor.
It can also help you avoid costly mistakes. For example, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge experienced enormous viral success which was driven by user participation. However, this campaign benefitted from being pitched at a broad audience, and an organisation catering to a smaller niche market might not have fared so well with the same tactics.
3. Grads with an MA in Advertising Strategy & Planning Need to Ensure Viral Campaigns are Ideal for Online Sharing
No matter how good your viral campaign idea is it won’t go anywhere if no one sees it, so it’s important to design it with online sharing in mind. Short, visual content tends to work best, while campaigns that encourage user participation or incorporate special offers or giveaways also gain a lot of traction online.
MA students can optimise their campaigns for online sharing using strategic, campaign-specific hashtags, calls-to-action, and other elements.
It’s also important to optimise your content for online sharing. Any videos, images, or other media posted online should include social media buttons to encourage users to share it, while developing strategic, campaign specific hashtags, calls-to-action and other optimisation elements will also help you gain more visibility. Once you have the right idea and have made it easy for your audience to share your content, you’ll increase your chances of it becoming a viral sensation.
Including social media buttons on your content will encourage viral sharing online
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