30-second summary:
- Every successful content campaign understands its audience and knows their pulse. How do you know whether your content campaign is worthy of being viral?
- Fractl’s first in-depth study into viral emotions found that the most common emotions invoked when consuming viral content were amusement, interest, and surprise.
- Domenica D’Ottavio shares the key ingredients of successful content campaigns with some interesting examples.
Successful content begins with understanding your audience. What does your audience like? What do they avoid? What do they want to learn more about? What are they most likely to share and engage with?
Fractl’s first in-depth study into viral emotions found that the most common emotions invoked when consuming viral content[1] were amusement, interest, and surprise. After executing thousands of content campaigns, we keep these three emotions in mind when creating content—particularly the element of surprise.
Easier said than done, though. What makes content[2] surprising? How can you use surprise in your content marketing campaigns to earn links and media coverage at top-tier websites?
In this post, I’m going to share two examples of content market campaigns[3] that embraced the element of surprise and why they were primed to be successful.
Content with shock value is primed for social sharing
You often don’t know, until you start working on a project, whether your content will offer something readers don’t expect.
If something is surprising enough to get Whoopi Goldberg talking about it, you know you were successful. In a survey execution for one home-improvement client, we asked 1,000 Americans about their cooking habits.
What seemed innocuous at first, quickly became a link building success[4], in large because of the huge disparities in the results.
Why the content worked
Not only did