In the marketing landscape today, we are seeing pharma marketers who aren’t afraid to challenge their audience but are stuck behind the barrier to entry for creating and publishing something totally unique. How do you advertise for attention and not just to share your message?

Social networks and other channels for distribution are flooded with content – and so naturally, as a way of filtering and screening our never-ending feeds, we gravitate to the content that everyone else is sharing. Content that now piques our interest are widely shared articles, infographics and videos that resonate with us, giving us almost a déjà vu moment that we can all see ourselves in.

So, I hear you ask what’s the science behind viral content? What’s the secret blend that will increase your chance of going viral?

1. You’ve got to do something worth talking about to get your customers talking.

According to George Loewenstein’s information gap theory, we act to fill a gap between what we know, and what we want to know.

As humans, we crave to be seen as being in the know, and having content worth telling your colleagues and friends about has almost become a form of currency and will help you to build traction online.

Your job as a marketer is to give people something to fill their gap and make it something they don’t just want to but need to talk about. So, the focus must be on creating quality content that resonates with your audience over the long term.

2. You’ve got to capture specific emotions.

Capturing the emotions of your target audience in your communications is nothing new. This emotional content needs to connect to personal experiences as people often remember content that relates to their own experiences.

Content that triggers virality the most is said to contain either amusement, delight, interest, affection, surprise, happiness, joy, hope, excitement or pleasure.

The online world is very congested, and it can be hard to know how much is too much and how to set a tone that will make people want to share your content. Telling a story that your audience can relate to may encourage them to share your content further and keep the story going. A key part of this is to engage with your audience by encouraging them to share their own related stories or experiences in the comments of your post.

3. You’ve got to push buttons.

To go viral, you need to inject some personality into your marketing, and to enable that to happen you’ll need to identify your persona and then push one, or more, of these buttons:

• The taboo
• The unusual
• The outrageous
• The hilarious
• The remarkable
• The powerful
• The secret giver or keeper (I did that in the title of this article…)

Here are 10 examples of campaigns that reinvented pharma marketing by tapping into one of the above.

4. You’ve got to stay on top of your game.

The social media landscape is always changing and making sure you are on top of algorithms, ever-evolving platforms and trends can be a mind game – but so is wasting your time posting to an audience that just isn’t there.

Are the only Threads they know something they sew with or are they on it more than Zuckerberg? Do your research into your audience and find out what interests them and dive deep into the places where they hang out online.

So how do you go viral?

While there’s no guaranteed formula and no real science behind the art of going viral, there are plenty of hacks. Jumping on trends and hashtags can work but the real test is to create content that is creative, engaging and timely.

To keep your content moving you need to encourage open conversations around issues and remove stigma. It’s only by using this approach that you will gain an audience’s attention, earn their trust and get them to engage and share your message further.

By Kelly Crampton, Marketing Manager