Digitalks #26: Creating Viral Campaigns with Strategic Thinking
How to stand out and capture attention in the crowded landscape
Digitalks is a virtual brown bag meeting by Breadnbeyond’s Digital Marketing team where all valuable information, feedback, ideas, seminars, and training sessions are shared.
Learn how to make viral and winning campaigns with the expert.
Luck is never the key to blowing up your campaign on social media.
Instead, strategic thinking and a solid plan are what make the difference.
Our senior writer, Damar, recently attended an insightful webinar featuring Irfan Wahid, commonly known as Ipang Wahid.
Ipang is a communication expert and lobbyist specializing in politics, government relations, and corporations.
Throughout the webinar, he shared strategies for creating viral and long-lasting campaigns with strategic thinking.
What Is Strategic Thinking?
We can define strategic thinking as a way of planning ahead and thinking creatively to achieve long-term goals.
Creative thinking means coming up with unique ideas (thinking outside the box) and understanding what your audience wants and how they behave.
On top of that, since viral campaigns are meant for social media, staying on top of the latest trends is crucial.
When it comes to strategic thinking, we don’t just opt for quick wins.
We aim to create a solid plan and ensure all efforts add up to something bigger and more successful in the long run.
The Art of Perception Engineering
After being known as a director, political communication consultant, and branding consultant, Ipang Wahid now calls himself by another name: Perception Engineer.
This term might sound unfamiliar to many people. But What exactly is perception engineering?
Here’s what Ipang explained about his role.
Perception engineering focuses on shaping and influencing how consumers see a brand.
They manage consumers’ perceptions and beliefs about a brand to create a favorable image and emotional connection.
3 Pillars of Perception Engineering
A perception engineer will look into three pillar aspects when building a campaign.
- Strategy: Deals with data analytics, SWOT-ing, positioning, tagline, and programming.
- Content: Focuses on message, execution, and medium.
- Distribution: Conventional media, new media, and PR activation.
Among these, positioning is one of the most crucial factors for a viral and long-lasting campaign.
Positioning means finding relevancy between what you want to say and what your target audience is interested in.
Ipang shared two study cases to illustrate how he created winning campaigns and gained significant achievements.
Case Study: Ramayana Ramadan Campaign
Strategy
- Data: Ramadan-themed ads full of serious storytelling.
- Positioning: Create a memorable, lighthearted-but-funny campaign with a nostalgic feeling.
Content
- Qasidah group with relatable lyrics and jingle.
Distribution
- All social media platforms and encourage user-generated content (UGC)
Results
- The most viral 2018 Ramadan-themed ad.
- The most-loved ad in Asia (2018)
- 17 million organic views.
- Highest revenue for Ramayana in the last 40 years.
Element of Viral Content
Talking about viral content, Ipang mentioned four elements to make attention-grabbing, engaging, and shareable content.
- Entertaining
- Controversial
- Emotional
- Informative
He also emphasized more factors that make a campaign work, including
- Focusing only on a single message
- Use a creative and innovative approach
- Has a memorable hook
- Use market-driven strategy
- Make it relatable to audiences
- Must be adaptive to trends
Contrastingly, Ipang also stressed three factors that can make a campaign fail to thrive, such as:
- Copycat content.
- Heavily brand-centered.
- Not using sufficient data for constructing strategy.
Ending his webinar session, Ipang quoted an insightful message that says:
“Strategic thinking is essential. We must focus on our goals, identify our positioning, determine our target audience, and always start with creative ideas relevant to current trends.”
More Digitalks:
Breadnbeyond can also help you create share-worthy and memorable campaign content with explainer videos.
Learn more about animated explainer videos and our services here.
If you want to read more Digitalk content full of expert insights, feel free to visit our Digitalk section.
