Have you ever thought, “This is bound to go viral,” only to find out…it didn’t?
Have you ever banked on “going viral” to grow your business?
Going viral is the Holy Grail of digital marketing. The idea that you can go from zero to “Poo-Pouri” with one viral video is a fantasy.
I’ve spent years working with the teams behind Epic Meal Time, CorridorDigital, RocketJump, and even Discover Digital to learn the formula behind making a video go viral. I’ve even starred in a few of these videos along the way.
The key takeaway? Every viral video followed similar formula to create their first “viral” hit.
That formula is what I’m sharing with you today, using a case study of how my team helped Six Pack Shortcuts create their first viral video that hit four millions views. This video was a real turning point in their business and YouTube channel.
Six Pack Shortcuts now has over 4,000,000 subscribers on YouTube…
Let’s get into it.
The 3-Step Viral Video Formula
While there are never any viral guarantees, you’ll see just how possible it is when you’re following a structured formula and creating your viral-intended content with intention.
Viral Video Formula Step #1: Ride The Wave
When I talked with Six Pack Shortcuts about this project, we knew the key to going viral was going to be to ride the wave of a growing trend. The trick is to keep it relevant, and to be one of the first to catch the wave.
This is where people struggle.
Some may think a cute cat video will help them go viral. But – and this is important – there’s no point having a cat video go viral if your business is in real estate. (Unless, of course, the cat was one of the best renovators or realtors people had ever seen.)
Here’s the beginnings of the viral video formula…
What you need to do is find a growing trend and create a parody or similar video to grow alongside it.
Remember, Six Pack Shortcuts is about good fitness and nutrition. We knew our “wave” would be fitness related, whether that be exercise-related or healthy food prep-related (cinnamon challenge, anyone?).
At the time, the Epic Meal Time Channel was starting to absolutely crush it on YouTube by creating hilarious videos in the food space. They had attracted a major audience of people that Six Pack Shortcuts would love to reach.
This set us up with a relevant and natural wave to ride – we decided to create a parody of an Epic Meal Time video.
If you’re not familiar with their style, check out a typical epic meal time video (NOTE: You’ll even see me in this video if you pay close attention)…
Instead of cramming bacon in our mouths, the Six Pack Shortcuts would use the parody video to show how you could create an enormous, but nutritious, meal.
This was going to be fun.
Viral Video Formula Step #2: The Missing Element
Going viral is pretty simple actually. You just need a bunch of people to share your video.
It’s simple, but not easy.
For every viral cat video, there are millions that with 15 views.
Assuming the video pounces on a rising trend (as it is rising) — the missing element is traffic.
I’d argue that every viral video got a boost of traffic, which helped it reach the tipping point, and gives it the insane views. This initial injection of traffic primes the pump and the viral sharing takes over from there.
And the more people that share, the more viral your video will become.
I knew that we needed to make a video that would be shared, not only by the general public, but by the people who had the largest traffic to control.
This meant targeting a parody at people who already had a huge viral following, instead of the public at large.
This changes our formula to the following…
At the time of writing this, Epic Meal Time’s channel has 7,037,735 subscribers, and its most watched video boasts 27,959,231 views.
They’ve built a massive following, and have the ability to send a ton of traffic to our video at Six Pack Shortcuts. That’s important – so read it again.
We knew we needed Epic Meal Time to give us that tipping point traffic boost. So, as you’ll see in the video below, we were very careful not to offend Epic Meal Time. We actually have a lot of respect for them — and we wanted them to know that.
Viral Video Formula Step #3: Keep it Relevant
Don’t forget — the video must be RELEVANT to your business.
Epic Meal Time’s viewers are the PERFECT target audience for our Healthy Meal Time video. People who enjoy indulging in food might want to learn a healthier way of doing it.
This meant that we could kill two birds with one stone. We target a video to the Epic Meal Time team hoping they would promote it, and share it for free to get us the traffic we needed, while ensuring it was the RIGHT kind of traffic for Six Pack Shortcuts.
Lastly, we add a simple call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the video, literally telling them to visit sixpackshortcuts.com for the viewer to learn more about eating a more nutritious diet.
This was enough to collect an epic amount of free leads if the video went viral.
Here’s the entire video created by Six Pack Shortcuts that parodies the popular Epic Meal Time video I showed you earlier…
The final concern that we wanted to avoid insulting the creators of Epic Meal Time.
We needed to add a unique twist to our video, and above all, design it in a way to honor and not insult the Epic Meal Time creators, so they would be comfortable sharing it.
It was a roll-of-the-dice to hope Epic Meal Time would promote it, but it’s a lot easier than hoping your cat video will go viral, and it turned out to be enough to get the shows’ creator to tweet and like the video, which sent millions of free viewers to the video.
In fact, the video was such a success that within just a few hours of going live it had generated over $36,000 in sales for Six Pack Shortcuts.
To make your video go viral, consult the formula we used above. Brainstorm relevant concepts around an emerging trend. Most importantly, remember that before millions will share your video — you’ll need a single influencer to share it first.
