We all have a target audience. It’s tempting to try to reach everyone who could possibly be interested in your product, but everyone needs to target a specific group of people. Now you’ve found your niche market, is it big enough to fuel a viral hit on social media?
The answer is probably yes. If your niche is too small you can probably tell enough people about your viral content yourself!
Here is an example of a viral personality test we did with Creative Market. They describe themselves as a ‘platform for handcrafted, mousemade design content from independent creatives around the world’. They are the current leaders in this field. They wanted to create the personality test “If you were a Pantone color, which one would you be?”
Some people might think – ‘A color test? Everyone’s already taken all of those!’ It’s true that color tests have been spectacularly popular, but there’s always a new angle that gets people interested. People have a surprisingly close affinity with color!
The clever part of this test is that it revolves around the Pantone color system – a design industry standard. Pantone select a ‘color of the year’. Not only do they have lustrous names like ‘Marsala’ and ‘Radiant orchid’ they also have sumptuous descriptions.
How Minion Yellow helped this niche market
Matching Pantone colors with personality for designers is very clever but we took it another step further when Chi, our Designer extraordinaire, discovered there was an actual Pantone number for Minion Yellow and Tardis Blue.
This created an extra level of fun and jeopardy as some people really wanted to get Minion Yellow – just as much as others wanted to avoid it! The Twitter feeds were full of designers who were delighted to be a Minion and others raging about the horror of it. Exchanges like the one below have been going for weeks.
“The golden rule to remember for viral content is that people love to share interesting and flattering things about themselves.”
So what caused this personality test to go viral in this niche market?
There are a number of factors:
- Creative Market has an active blog and a newsletter with a big user base – this gave the test an initial push
- Designers identified with the subject of the test
- Designers liked the descriptions of the colors/ personalities enough to share them
- They also enjoyed fun element of the Minions, and to a lesser extent the Tardis Blue, polarised opinions leading to more shares for these colors on social media.
- The main image was appealing and interesting to designers so they were more likely to click on it when it appeared in their social media feeds.
- The test is still being shared regularly on social media weeks after the launch. It could have done well without the big initial push from the Creative Market blog.
The science behind creating viral content for your niche market
Is there something that is specialised for your niche? Something that your audience will know more about than the average person? Thought of something? Great! Now think of something fun you can do with it. Keep it as simple as possible – What type of ____ are you? What’s your true ____?Keep the writing style and most of the content on topic, but also ask the user some questions about how they react in certain everyday situations. This helps you split people into the different personality types.Makes those personality types funny, appealing and flattering.Try and use a polarising answer type – like the MinionsUse good images for the articles. You can find a wide selection of sites such as pexels.com offering fabulous free images that you don’t need to attribute. You can also do surprisingly arty things with the title image using Canva – it’s free and is refreshingly easy to use.Don’t give up. Your first effort may not become a viral wonder, but the next one might. Some content lies dormant for a while before it takes off. Experiment with different titles and you should soon be on your way to your first viral hit!
