As a marketer, you want your brand activation to go viral. Your next event, campaign, or brand experience should capture your audience’s attention in such a compelling way that they want to organically share it for you. You want them to promote your brand across multiple channels - from TikTok to Instagram to word of mouth. For your brand activation to reach a wide audience quickly, you need to generate buzz and engagement, and then you want to see its impact on your brand awareness, reputation, and sales. Large format printing can help bring a bold and creative concept to a profitable reality.
Key Elements of a Viral Brand Activation
High Shareability: Viral activations are designed to be highly shareable. They contain elements that people find worth sharing with their networks. The more people share it, the wider it spreads.
Emotional Engagement: Successful brand activations often trigger strong emotions —whether it's surprise, excitement, or even controversy. These emotions prompt people to share the activation with others.
Unique and Memorable Experience: Your activation should offer something unique that stands out from everyday marketing noise. It could be an unexpected pop-up event or an interactive experience that makes your brand memorable.
Social Media Amplification: For the hope of going viral, your activation should be crafted with social sharing in mind, encouraging attendees and online followers to post photos, videos, hashtags, and personal experiences related to the event.
Newsworthiness and PR Appeal: For your activation to go viral, it helps if it has a hook that grabs the attention of the media, bloggers, and influencers. A newsworthy activation gets covered in the press, which can amplify its reach.
Timeliness and Relevance: Your activation should resonate with current trends, events, or cultural moments to feel relevant and timely. Activating around a major event or tapping into a trending topic can increase the likelihood of going viral.
CR&A Custom utilizes its deep expertise and experience in large format printing to help marketers design and execute successful brand activations. Its team of creatives take a client’s idea and transform it into beautifully printed assets that create attention and engagement.
Ideal Goals For Your Brand Activation
Maximize Reach and Impact: Viral activations reach large audiences quickly, often far beyond the brand's existing customer base.
Cost-Effective Marketing: Going viral can offer a high return on investment since much of the promotion happens organically through shares and word-of-mouth.
Build Brand Affinity and Loyalty: A memorable and engaging experience can create a deeper emotional connection with your customers, fostering brand loyalty.
Enhance Brand Awareness: Viral activations can dramatically boost brand awareness, helping your brand to become top-of-mind for your consumers.
CR&A Custom believes that making a brand activation go viral is about creating an experience: One that is so captivating that it spreads quickly and widely, reaching and engaging a vast audience with minimal effort beyond the initial creative execution.
Tips For Making Your Brand Activation Go Viral
1. Know Your Audience
Do you really understand your audience? What makes them tick? What keeps them up at night? What's the one thing that, if you whispered it in their ear, would have them running to your event in pajamas at 3am?
It’s not just about demographics anymore; it’s about psychographics. It’s not enough to know their age, gender, or income—you’ve got to dig deeper. What are their dreams? Their fears? The more you know, the more you can craft an experience that will hit them right in the feels.
2. Be Bold or Go Home
No brand activation ever went viral by playing it safe. You need a concept that’s daring. Think big, think different. Give your brand activation a shock factor—not just for the sake of being shocking, but because it cuts through the noise and makes people stop scrolling.
3. Make It Interactive—Turn Your Audience into Co-Creators
People want to be part of the story. The most successful brand activations are those that turn passive viewers into active participants. Your activation should have an element that gets your audience involved—make them feel like they’re co-creators, not just spectators.
4. Use FOMO
Fear of Missing Out—FOMO—is your friend. Make your activation something people absolutely have to experience. Make it exclusive. Limited-time only. Remember that pop-up museum that was just Instagram heaven? Or the ice cream truck that only gave out freebies to people with a certain number of followers? That’s the kind of scarcity and urgency that makes people feel like if they miss your event, they'll regret it.
5. Amplify Through Social Media
Your activation needs to be shareable from the start. Design everything with social in mind, from the event visuals to the engagement tactics. Think about influencer partnerships, live streams, behind-the-scenes content, and user-generated content campaigns. Your goal? Create a snowball effect that makes your activation spread.
6. Measure, Learn, and Pivot
Measure everything. Track engagement, shares, attendance, feedback, and any other metric that tells you how well your activation performed. And don’t just gather data; use it. Analyze what worked, what didn’t, and make adjustments on the fly. A good marketer learns more from a flop than from a runaway success.
Final Thought: The Magic of Moments
Your viral brand activation should be about creating a moment—one that’s so unexpected, so unique, so buzzworthy that people just have to talk about it. This can be achieved through large format print as well as through digital channels. It's about more than just a product or a service; it's about an experience. So create moments that matter, that make people laugh, cry, or at the very least, raise an eyebrow. And remember, fortune favors the bold.
