New research indicates that a viral spark is actually ignited in your content’s ability to strike the right emotional chords; particularly the ideal levels of arousal and dominance.

Researchers Jacopo Staiano of Sorbonne University and Marco Guerini of Trento Rise took a closer look at the roles that arousal and dominance play in virality. They discovered that content goes viral when it evokes an emotional response. This response falls within certain configurations of arousal and dominance – two dimensions used by psychologists to categorize emotions. More specifically, these dimensions describe the following:

• Arousal ranges from excitement to relaxation. Anger is a high-arousal emotion; sadness is low-arousal.
• Dominance ranges from submission to feeling in control. Fear is low-dominance; an emotion someone has more choice over, such as admiration, is high-dominance.

The team at Fractl wanted to attempt to unlock any patterns in ideal configurations in viral content. Using the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model, we analyzed the emotional responses to some of the top images from Reddit’s r/pics community and discovered that there are three ideal emotional combinations for viral content.

Here I’ll walk you through what these findings mean for your marketing efforts/. I’ll also provide examples of what successful campaigns look like for each combination.

Tap into Positive Feelings

We began our research by showing respondents the Reddit images and asking them one simple question; How does this picture make you feel? The results indicate that the top viral emotions tend to be incredibly positive.

Admiration, happiness, and love, for instance, were the most common positive emotions to appear when both arousal and dominance were high. These responses also occasionally included an element of surprise. Viral content tends to align with high arousal emotions like happiness and admiration.

Ellen DeGeneres’ now infamous Oscar selfie is a great example of the high-arousal, high-dominance configuration in action. Although it was supposedly “spontaneous,” Samsung’s Chief Marketing Officer told Adweek that it planned to have Ellen take a selfie with Meryl Streep using one of the brand’s smartphones. The photo – along with all of the star-studded faces in it – evokes a true sense of happiness, and tapping into one of the top viral emotions propelled the image to become the most retweeted selfie of all time.

For Negative Emotions, Include an Element of Surprise.

When arousal was high and dominance was low, respondents always reported feelings of surprise. More specifically, these configurations were surprise mixed with positive emotions or surprise paired with a combination of both positive and negative emotions.

Fear and distress were the most common negative feelings in this configuration. BlinkBox tapped into these emotions along with surprise by planting a 40-foot-long dragon skull on a British beach. The massive (and successful) stunt was used to plug Game of Thrones’ third season.

Another negative viral configuration included low levels of both arousal and dominance. Our results revealed that although there was a greater variation in emotional responses for this combination, surprise was the primary or secondary response for nearly every image. And unlike the high arousal combinations where positive emotions were always present, the low-arousal, low-dominance configuration proved that as long as an image was surprising, resulting responses could be either purely positive or negative.

Consider Dove’s “Choose Beautiful” video. The clip features women in five cities being offered the option to enter a building through either of two doors: one labeled “beautiful,” the other “average.” The campaign received some mixed reviews when it was released, but whether or not you agree with the ad’s message doesn’t take away from its success: To date, the campaign has more than seven million views on YouTube.

The Big Takeaway: Virality Isn’t a Shot in the Dark.

The good news is that studies continue to prove that content’s viral potential isn’t a matter of luck. Our data presents a blueprint to consider when outlining your next campaign. Remember that if you hit the right emotional combinations, there’s a good chance your content will connect with more than your targeted audience – a key ingredient in stoking that viral spark.

The post Why Virality is More About an Emotional Connection than Luck appeared first on Relevance.

Why the push for an inbound approach? Content marketing is about attracting attention through a more genuine connection. Instead of something overly promotional, your audience expects something that has high value with very little branding. The goal is to encourage engagement through this content that eventually fosters a relationship and will lead to a conversion.

Attention, relationships, and conversions all make up various levels of the sales funnel, and part of content marketing’s appeal is it can reach your target audience at each stage. Here’s how content marketing impacts three stages of the funnel: generating awareness, building trust and converting leads.

Increase awareness through an off-site promotion strategy that targets authoritative sites.

Content marketing success relies heavily on authoritative publishers, and luckily for marketers, these publishers are always looking for a steady stream of great content. Another benefit to working with publishers? It is the most effective way for your content to impact consumers at the awareness level. More specifically, additional gains from earned media include:

• Search engines indexing your site higher through a strong inbound link portfolio
• Growth in traffic to your site from new and returning visitors
• A higher return on the content you created because you’re actively promoting it versus simply relying on natural syndication

A great example of an effective outreach strategy is Groove’s highly targeted guest blogging efforts, which helped the software startup reach more than 1 million people. One guest post alone, for instance, earned the company more than 10,000 social shares along with more than 20,000 unique visitors. Although the overall influence of the content can be impacted by multiple factors – including the date and time of when the post is published – one thing is clear: Guest blogging is a cost-effective way to impact the top of the sales funnel.

Establish yourself as a thought leader and build trust with your target audience through valuable on-site content.

An effective blogging strategy doesn’t have to rely solely on earning guest posts, though. An on-site blog is a great way to establish authority – a crucial step in the sales funnel that will continue to drive your leads down to possible conversions.

The growth of KISSmetrics’ blog is a perfect example of one brand using on-site posts to position itself as a leader in its industry. Last January, more than 60 percent of the site’s leads for that month were generated through the blog.

Other on-site content that can increase your authority? White papers, case studies and eBooks—especially when grouped together. For instance, Cox Media created a “Success Kit” for small businesses that included an eBook and video. The bundle led to more than 500 downloads and generated more than 2,000 leads.

Drive conversion events through gated on-site content to optimize bottom line results.

It’s clear that a mix of on- and off-site content can generate awareness and drive traffic – a successful content marketing strategy has the potential to increase traffic by 850 percent – but how do you ensure content conversions? Make sure your content includes a call to action.

Remember that although the goal of any content should be to drive conversions, it has a greater chance of driving conversion events. A common one is asking your audience to provide an email address in exchange for your content. This initiates a conversation with a potential consumer and offers the opportunity to provide them with additional content that can drive them further down the funnel.

However, this content can also be optimized for lower-funnel conversions. For instance, BuzzStream launched a combination of large-scale, research-based campaigns that earned placements on high-authority sites. These campaigns were hyper-targeted to consumers who were already close to conversions, and because all off-site content led to a gated on-site asset, the company managed to break its record for new subscriber sign-ups.

Another way to optimize bottom line results is to shorten your sales cycle. For example, PR Newswire launched a content marketing strategy in an effort to accelerate its sales funnel of more than 25,000 potential consumers. Through highly targeted, automated emails and expanding its client interaction to multiple channels, the company shortened its sales cycle by 30 percent in only a year.

The biggest takeaway from our research?

Carefully align content with your business goals while maintaining high value for your consumers.

Although there is no go-to content marketing strategy that will ensure every potential lead ends up at the bottom of your sales funnel, offering highly targeted, off-site content that leads back to conversion-optimized, on-site content will help initiate a conversation with your target audience.

Check out this deck highlighting five additional case studies that reveal how content marketing can drive your bottom line. Understanding how your content can benefit each stage of the funnel will help stimulate ideas that will have a profound impact on awareness, traffic, search rankings, and lead generation.

The post How A Content Marketing Strategy Impacts Your Bottom Line appeared first on Relevance.

However, this also means that the competition for attention is at an all-time high. As they turn up the volume on content marketing, marketers need to adopt new strategies to ensure their campaigns are loud enough to drown out the noise.

Vetting Publishers for Earned Media

Creative content is important, but concept and creation are only part of the process. Once a marketer has produced quality content, a highly-targeted promotions (or outreach) cycle should follow; it’s what gets a brand’s message in front of the right audience. Brand awareness is a massive conversion driver, so it’s important that a brand put in, at least, an equal amount of effort during its promotions process as during production of the content.

To maximize your outreach efforts, start determining publishing targets while your content is still in production. Consider which publishers are worth the exclusive story versus those that should be saved for syndication. This attention to detail is especially important if your campaign explores a controversial topic.

Understanding the tone of your campaign is the best filter for vetting publishers. You can start by reviewing how different publications present similar topics. With this strategy in mind, BuzzStream and Fractl examined the sentiment toward 10 controversial topics – climate change, evolution, health care, immigration, jobs, marijuana, minimum wage, net neutrality, privacy, and vaccination.

We considered 50 articles covering each topic from more than 75 popular online publishers. We determined sentiment using AlchemyAPI, which helped us determine the tone of an article as either positive or negative.

Note: The sentiment or coverage of a topic was deemed negative if it contained words or phrases that evoke negative emotions (within the context of the article). For example, an article about protesters wanting a minimum wage increase would be considered negative.

To maximize your next promotions cycle, you’ll want to keep these five key takeaways in mind. Doing so will help to extend your reach beyond your target audience.

1. Only two topics (health care & evolution) earned positive coverage.

These are contentious subjects for a reason, and eight out of the 10 topics tend to earn negative coverage from a majority of publishers.

Out of the only two topics to earn positive sentiment scores, health care articles are the most positive: coverage is 32 percent more positive than that of evolution. Our data also indicate that vaccination coverage is the most negative of the group.

Additional analysis revealed these details:

• Net neutrality had the highest number of articles with “neutral” coverage – nearly 600 records, or more than 20 percent of the total records.
• Coverage of vaccination was nearly 150 percent more negative than coverage of privacy, the topic that earned the weakest negative sentiment score.
• Although “jobs” was less negative than six topics, it did have the highest number of records (four) in the most negative sentiment rating.

2. Sites that include job postings tend to be more positive.

LinkedIn is arguably one of the most popular sites for job postings, and it offers users the ability publish their own insights on a variety of topics. Our results indicate that these posts are typically positive, which isn’t too surprising considering LinkedIn is a career-centric site; users want to come across as easy to work with instead of difficult.

However, LinkedIn was the second most positive jobs publisher. Mediabistro was actually the most positive – 50 percent more so than LinkedIn. It’s also jobs-focused like LinkedIn, although it tends to be centered on the publishing industry.

3. When possible, connect your topic to the technology vertical.

Want a great way to increase coverage? Connect your content to multiple verticals.

Sure, the topics we examined are controversial, but a majority of them are not limited to a specific vertical. Our results indicate that if you want to earn more positive coverage, you should try to connect your topic to a niche within a technology-based publisher. For example, VentureBeat, IGN, InformationWeek, TechCrunch and ZDNet produced more positive coverage for all 10 topics.

Further analysis revealed the following:

• VentureBeat was the most positive tech-based publisher – 177 percent more so than ZDNet.
• InformationWeek was nearly 40 percent more positive than TechCrunch.

4. Publishers with negative sentiment scores tend to focus on general news coverage.

If you want to shy away from negative coverage on a controversial topic, avoid pitching publishers that focus on broad reporting; their articles tend to be more negative than any other outlet. For example, Mirror’s negative coverage was nearly 200 percent more negative than DailyFinance – the only niche publisher of the entire group.

Additional analysis revealed the following:

• Gawker was the most negative publisher for all 10 topics.
• A large portion of these publishers were based in countries outside the U.S., including Daily Mail (U.K.), Mirror (U.K.), RT (Russia) and Al Jazeera (Qatar).
• Negative sentiment varied by regional publisher in the United States. For example, the Los Angeles Times was more than 10 percent more negative than the Houston Chronicle.

5. Net neutrality was the only topic to earn both positive and negative coverage by online newspapers.

A lot of local newspapers have made the transition to digital publishing, so we compared a handful to some of the larger online newspapers (the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today and The Boston Globe) to see where their coverage landed for all 10 topics.

Our results indicated that net neutrality is the only topic that these publishers cannot agree on unanimously. It received negative coverage from every publisher except The Boston Globe.

Additional insights revealed the following:

• Although the publishers are in the same state, net neutrality coverage was 164 percent more negative for the Los Angeles Times compared with the San Francisco Chronicle.
• The New York Times’ coverage of privacy was overwhelmingly negative compared with coverage by all other outlets, and nearly 155 percent more negative than The Washington Post.
• The sentiment of climate change coverage had little variation among all seven publishers.

Readers don’t find content by mistake. It’s the result of a highly-targeted promotions cycle. Every content plan needs a complementary outreach approach that identifies those publishers worthy of exclusives versus syndications. Your plan should also consider the tone of your campaign; keep that tone in mind when assessing whether a publisher is likely to produce a positive or negative article. Doing so will ensure that your potentially contentious topic doesn’t necessarily earn negative coverage.

Study by Fractl and BuzzStream.

The post How the Sentiment of Earned Media Varies by Subject appeared first on Relevance.

Viral videos continue to increase in popularity, and it’s no surprise why: Social media users upload 100 hours of video to YouTube every minute, and by 2018, more than 80 percent of all Internet traffic will be video content. Successful marketers realize they need to utilize video if they want to remain competitive, and the most successful strategists understand that instead of starting with the goal to “go viral,” they begin by creating compelling content. However, no matter where you start, there is always one inevitable discussion: How heavily branded should the content be?

BuzzStream and Fractl surveyed over 900 respondents to better understand the perception of branding in viral videos. The first part of the survey focused on general brand awareness, while the second part asked respondents to watch five viral videos and gauge their opinion on the amount of branding used.

The five videos included:

• Big Order (Bud Light)
• Liquid Mountaineering (Hi-Tec)
• Dear Sophie (Google Chrome)
• Opinions Welcome (Laphroaig)
• Driver for a Day (UPS)

Here are five key concepts to keep in mind during your next video production:

1. If your content is heavily branded, look to trigger positive emotions.

The presence of a brand’s logo on any asset can lead to heated debates between creative strategists and brand managers; one side is concerned with too much branding, while the other is concerned there may not be enough. And our data proves the discussion is warranted:

• Exactly 50 percent of respondents said they are turned off by a video where a logo is displayed either prominently or occasionally throughout.
• Another 35 percent of respondents argued they would not share ads disguised as videos.

You want to be sure consumers properly identify your brand, but you don’t want to limit your video’s reach. So what’s a possible solution? Make sure that your content elicits a positive emotional response.

In a study on viral emotions, Fractl asked 60 respondents to look at 30 of the top 100 images of the year from Imgur as voted on Reddit, and they noted which emotions each image activated for them. Using Robert Plutchik’s comprehensive Wheel of Emotion as our categorization, the results revealed that positive emotions, as opposed to negative emotions, were found more consistently in highly viral campaigns.

This same principle was reaffirmed in our current study, in which two of the most heavily branded videos – Google Chrome and UPS – made respondents feel “happy.” These feelings also contributed to the brands gaining additional credibility in the eyes of the respondents.

When put into practice, begin by determining your desired level of branding, and if it has to be high, be sure you include content that will evoke positive reactions.

2. If your content elicits negative emotions, be sure to include an element of surprise.

According to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. And not all of these words may ignite positive feelings, but that’s OK: A video with negative emotions can still achieve viral success when it’s paired with a sense of anticipation and surprise.

In the same study on viral emotions, similar emotions within Plutchik’s segments of anticipation and surprise were overwhelmingly represented. Specifically:

• Curiosity
• Amazement
• Interest
• Astonishment
• Uncertainty

In the current survey, respondents identified feelings of “interest” in three videos – Bud Light, Hi-Tec, and Laphroaig. Considering 27 percent of respondents also added that they would forward a viral campaign if it were surprising, you’ll want to work in an element of shock to increase social traction.

3. Heavy branding doesn’t mean your brand will be easily identifiable.

Everything we want to know about a brand is only a few clicks away because of the Internet, so consumers no longer want a brand’s latest news or products in their video content. They prefer to be entertained, and strategists are responding to this trend. However, some marketers use heavy branding as a crutch if they believe an idea is too “out there” and want to be sure a viewer identifies them correctly.

Strategists should tread lightly, though, when it comes to over branding. In our study, although Google Chrome was one of the most heavily branded videos, it was the only video for which respondents did not properly identify the brand (80 percent of respondents thought it was an ad for Gmail instead of the browser). In comparison, Laphroaig – the least branded video in the study – was correctly identified by 79 percent of respondents.

Our research also found that only 16 percent of respondents felt that a logo was the most attractive element of a brand, so remember that branding shouldn’t overpower your content. Hi-Tec’s Liquid Mountaineering is a great example of this, with the logo subtly appearing on the hats, jackets, and shoes worn by the actors. The video focuses on the phenomenon of walking on water instead of heavily branded product placement, which assisted in its viral reach.

4. Your content should rely on strong visual cues.

A majority of our respondents – 29 percent – believed that video was the most effective content type for brand awareness, followed closely by images at 26 percent. This indicates that consumers have a tendency to appreciate highly visual content, so successful viral videos will have strong visual cues.

When asked how they identified the brand in each video, four out of five brands were recognized by visual elements in their videos while only one – Laphroaig – was identified by elements of sound.

In order to increase the chances of your video being shared, be sure to include highly stylized and visually appealing elements. A great example is UPS’ Driver for a Day, where the iconic brown truck and uniform are scaled to fit the size of 4-year-old boy. Their unique size complemented with the images of a handwritten map and package labels make the visuals more emotionally charged – and the video more shareable.

5. Create content that is specific to your followers and shareable on multiple social platforms.

As mentioned before, instead of focusing on a video “going viral,” successful strategists focus on content that speaks to their existing followers – something critical if you want your content shared with others.

BuzzFeed looked at 50 stories that received the most Facebook traffic since mid-2007. The data revealed that content shared between friends rather than larger influencers was the most common way for articles to reach high social shares. Large influencers may be able to reach a broader group of people, but its research indicates that shares between friends on social platforms are much more valuable if you want your content to maximize social traction.

We took this a step further to figure out which social platforms consumers believe to have the most influence. We asked respondents to identify the most effective social media platforms for brand awareness:

• Facebook is the most popular platform at 45 percent.
• YouTube followed in second at less than 30 percent, with Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest rounding out the top five.

Remember, there are two goals for a viral video: to increase brand awareness and nurture the relationship with your existing audience. Effective content should connect with viewers on an emotional level, offering them something of value that ignites a conversation with a larger audience. By balancing the level of branding with compelling content, you’ll be sure to produce a video that your audience will want to share.

Study by Fractl and BuzzStream.

The post 5 Ways to Ensure Branded Video Success appeared first on Relevance.