For so many podcasters, the idea of going viral is something of a Holy Grail of marketing success.
The idea is that with enough attention, even if it exists only in the short-lived window before the next internet phenomenon comes along and relegates your viral hit to the annals of internet phenomena, you can transform your show and with it, your business forever.
It’s an alluring idea, that you can put in the hard work once, land on something that works once, and then be set for life forever.
Listeners, fans, customers and clients will all be yours for the taking.
But that’s rarely how things work.
Sure, many past viral sensations have cashed in during their 15 minutes, but how many of those initial fans and customers stuck around for the long haul?
My guess is not many.
Let’s look at a couple of reasons why shooting for virality is not a good strategy for most podcasters and businesses, and what the more promising alternative strategy looks like.
You’re Not in the Business of Mass Marketing
The vast majority of podcasters are in the business of offering a niche product to an even smaller niche among the group of people who might make up the larger category of people interested in their broad topic.
This is smart marketing.
By speaking intimately and directly to the smallest viable audience as Seth calls it, you’re able to build relationships and become the authority for people within that niche of a niche who are looking for what you offer.
Aiming for virality requires the opposite approach.
By necessity, for your content to go viral it needs to be broadly accessible and understood by a huge portion of the population, otherwise, it can’t go viral.
This is not speaking either intimately or directly to your chosen audience.
In some cases, your existing audience may even see this as a betrayal, as you selling out and leaving them behind.
And besides, even if you do succeed in making a hit and earning a mass amount of attention, do you have the systems and content in place to convert this new audience into super fans?
If you’re doing niche marketing correctly, your content is so finely tuned to speak directly to your existing audience, that everyone in your niche-within-a-niche already knows about you.
Your systems are also set up to walk your existing audience through their listener journey in a personal way that addresses them and their challenges uniquely.
With mass attention, it’s highly unlikely that you have the systems in place to convert any significant percentage of the people who interact with you that one time into returning audience members.
Which brings us to our second problem.
Viral Marketing is not Repeatable
Let’s say you still feel like a viral hit is the thing that would transform your show and business and get you where you want to be.
If you’ve set this as a specific goal, my guess is that you’re going to commit significant time to researching what type of content has the best chance of going viral, and significant expense into having that content created.
But regardless of whether your content lands or not, what will you do next?
Even if it does, in fact, go viral, it’s incredibly unlikely that this one breakthrough will be enough to sustain you.
And if it doesn’t land, how long will you put in the time and expense hoping that the next one will do better?
Creating viral content is not a repeatable strategy.
Shooting for viral content seems like a way to shortcut the long, difficult process of showing up consistently and giving generously to our audience, one drip at a time.
But the thing is that real shortcuts often look like the long way around. Until they’re not.
The real shortcut is sticking with a system that allows you to consistently create work that benefits your audience, that starts and continues an ongoing, protracted conversation in which you walk them along the journey they need to take to help them get where they’re looking to go.
There are no shortcuts to real marketing, to building an authentic relationship with your audience.
It’s often only after starting down and then abandoning a dozen roads that seemed like shortcuts that you realize it would have been quicker to commit to what appeared to be the long way around from the start.
By relying on a repeatable system and strategy of putting in the emotional labour involved in real marketing, of showing up with generosity and vulnerability and building an authentic relationship with your audience, you can know that while it may not be immediate, you are building something that has a much better chance of lasting.
Setting New Marketing Goals
If you believe in serving your niche better than anyone else, your strategy should not be aiming for mass-market virality one time hoping that will be the big break you’ve been waiting for.
Instead, aim to create content that resonates with one specific niche-within-a-niche, that addresses their challenges and walks them along their journey in a way that speaks directly to them.
Sure winning the internet for a day might be fun, it might bring some unique opportunities, it might even bring in a few new fans. But banking on it as a marketing strategy is letting down your core audience, failing to serve them at the level you’re capable of.
If it happens that you create a hit and go viral, let it be because it resonated first with your existing audience and they couldn’t help but spread it from there.
Remember that depth of attention is more valuable than breadth of attention, and that the people you put the hard work into building an authentic relationship with will still be with you long after your 15 minutes are up.
Jeremy travels full-time, loves long-distance cycle touring, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements. He believes that the way to grow sustainable businesses is by leading with heart, vulnerability, and helping your people be and become their best selves.
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