The Art of a Viral Campaign

This morning I awoke to a new campaign that was launched by the guys at Visual Website Optimizer and I was impressed.

Let’s break down the campaign:

The campaign landing page, in this instance a blog post, clearly provides incentive for visitors to engage in the campaign.  Take a look at the blog title, who doesn’t want to win $3000 worth of optimization services?

The parameters of the campaign (the challenge, prize, steps for how to enter, how the winner is chosen, and additional background information about the challenge) are clearly presented, front and center, and above the fold.

The call-to-action, pick which design you think is the winning version, is cleanly  presented on the page but what makes this work is how easy they made it to “enter the contest”.  A Tweet button is located beneath each option, you click the Tweet button for the version you think is the winner and that’s it, you’ve entered the contest.  Not only is this super easy for the visitor to do but it creates a great viral component to the campaign — now all my followers know I’ve chosen my winner is some contest, I’m sure they will click the link to find out more.

It was no surprise to me that after I tweeted my pick, conversations began to popup on Twitter about the contest.

Several of my followers entered the contest themselves.

A few side conversations started about why one version would perform better than the other.

Also, many of my followers retweeted my original Tweet that was generated when I entered the contest.

I would be amiss if I didn’t comment on targeting content to your audience.  This campaign is perfectly targeted to those of us who work in the measure and optimization community.  We all like to think that we know best when it comes to how to design a site for increased conversions, a test, a very public test, is a great way for us to prove our skills.  Campaigns that play on ego are typically very successful.

I’d be very interested to hear from the team at Visual Website Optimizer on how well this campaign performed.  From the outside looking in, this is a model for how to run a successful viral campaign.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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