The Impact of Viral Marketing on the Sneaker Industry
There are a lot of ingredients that go into making a viral piece of content. Obviously, there are the technical aspects with how many shares, how many comments it gets, and the SEO value of the headline that you put in. Those are big factors.
Another factor is, say it’s an interview, being brave enough to ask the right question that is going to get the right answer. One example that comes to mind is the sneaker shopping episode with Bella Hadid. Through that interview, there was a real viral moment where Joe asked her what sneakers a guy must be wearing to approach her.
“If homeboy is coming through with these, it quiet. Yeah, no, it’s quiet for him. But, like, if he comes through in these, you’ve got some Air Maxes out here, you’ve got some Jordans, homeboy’s going to, like, get it,” says Hadid.
One of these viral moments that really comes to mind is DJ Khaled on “Complex Closets.” Khaled’s famous line, “Congratulations, you played yourself,” became one of his catchphrases, and that was the first time you heard it, and it was memed. It was GIFed all over the internet.
It’s a combination of all of those things – just knowing the back-end part of it and knowing the right keywords and the right tags, and you also have to know the right SEO headline. Just having the right subject, being brave enough to ask the right questions, and getting that right content is what really makes something go viral.
One of the most important things to remember for social media is that you have to give somebody something and help somebody in some way. A lot of people approach this in sneaker media and in other media basically about conversions, about how they want to use a tweet to get a click or use a tweet to sell a pair of sneakers and make a little bit of money off that. That’s good sneaker education, right there.
But you’ll find that it’s not really about that. You have to think first and foremost about how you’re helping your audience. What are you giving them? Are you giving them a piece of information? Are you giving them a cool shoe? Are you giving them a meme that they might find interesting? Are you giving them an opinion on something that they may not have heard before that may help color their decisions?
You have to actually give them something of value. You can’t just think about the numbers. We get lost in that a lot because we have to make numbers, but you have to consider what your audience wants and what you can actually give to them to create a bond. That only furthers the trust you have with the people who follow you, with the people who read the things you write or consume the videos you watch, so remember all of these as you continue your online sneaker education.
What makes a social media campaign or a regular media campaign really work is authenticity. That’s always going to be what matters. You could really be someone. You could be someone with 500,000 followers, and if all you want to do is get paid by companies to post things, people are going to catch on to that and realize that you’ll just post anything provided you get the right amount of zeros at the end of the check.
Eventually, your following is going to trail off, and people aren’t going to trust you. You need to build up an identity first if you’re a person working on your own thing and be true to that and recognize that as much as your identity as you share people are building up their own identity for you or getting a feel for what you’re into and what you’re not into.
That’s not to say that you can’t evolve or you can’t change, but if you’re kind of all over the map or if you’re only posting whatever the newest stuff is no matter what it is, eventually people are going to realize they can probably get that from somewhere else. The only thing you really have is yourself.
If you’re a brand, it’s sort of the same way. If you’re pushing something as the latest and greatest, and two months later, you’re pushing something else as the latest and greatest and have completely abandoned whatever came before it, people are going to remember that. And eventually, they’re going to start questioning whether this new great thing is really that great at all or whether they even need to pay attention to it because a month from now there’ll be something else.
So that’s the important thing–remembering that other people are going to remember this stuff too. You can’t just throw random stuff into the void and assume it’s going to go away because it’s not.
