Moment Marketing Essentials: Tips and Examples for Creating Viral Campaigns

I’m not going to bore you by getting into the definition or basics of moment marketing. We all know, as its name suggests, it’s about making the best out of the moment by creating attention-grabbing marketing stuff to get the desired results. 

I believe in “show, not tell” as I’m a literature person who’s now into branding and digital marketing. So, in this article, I’m going to show you examples that’ll give you a super clear idea on moment marketing, its use and how to do moment marketing even when you don’t have a social media marketing person in your team. And I’ve got a bonus for you – in this article, I’ll also be guiding you on using ChatGPT for moment marketing. Don’t be surprised, ChatGPT can do help you with moment marketing. 

Moment marketing is the new favourite of marketers, copywriters, content writers, SEO specialists, digital marketers, influencers and marketing agencies. But is it really new? No! It has been there since ages. It’s just that we have christened the term now. 

Is moment marketing really important or it’s just a hyped term? 

What do you think? Lemme help you figure out the answer to this all by yourself. 

• Cost – Unlike the other forms of marketing, the costs involved in moment marketing are really low. All you need to do is just keep your hawk’s eye focussed on the trends and pick the right trend and moment to generate digital content on that moment to make the best out of it. 

• Engagement – Moment marketing, when done right, can do wonders to your brand by driving loads and loads of organic engagement. Do you remember the popular billboard Instagram post of Zomato and Blinkit. The post displayed two billboards where Blinkit on a billboard said: “doodh mangoge, doodh denge” and Zomato on the other billboard said: “kheer mangoge, kheer denge”. 

These utterly simple, yet catchy lines grabbed the attention of the audience and forced their minds to come up with something to complement these lines. People bombarded this Zomato and Blinkit’s post with a plethora of comments and reactions. They started posting their versions of this post on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and made this a trend. Forbes in an article titled, “Memes: A Digital Marketing Tool For Every Industry” states, “Our regular marketing graphics yielded 5% engagement [on Facebook and Instagram]. Using memes, we had about 10 times more reach with 60% organic engagement. There’s just no comparison.” That’s the power of using memes. 

Seeing the massive reaction of the audience towards Zomato’s billboard post, brands that knew how to channel moment marketing jumped in and started sharing their versions of this post. They started commenting down their versions, or some even posted their own memes based upon the lines coined by Zomato and Blinkit. And guess what, many of them succeeded in their shot at moment marketing! Their versions garnered a lot of public attention, resulting in a dramatic rise in their sales and traffic. 

Even Zomato itself, in its very next post, shared the meme versions of different brands, giving them a chance for extra exposure. 

• Bonding –  When you go deep into the trends that your target audience is already enjoying, and become a part of those trends and the community enjoying it by building content around those trends, you automatically start a friendly conversation with the audience you’re planning to target. They start considering you as their peer – a brand that values their choices and sentiments. That’s the magic of moment marketing. 

How to do moment marketing? Can I do it even when I don’t have a budget for hiring a marketing professional? 

If you’re running a small business or just a budding entrepreneur having little or no budget to spend on your brand, you know, you can even do without investing in hiring a social media marketing specialist for you. You’ve gotta believe me. I do the same for my baby startup. You can be your brand’s own moment marketer. But for that you’ve to take care of a few things – what I call the beautiful fundamentals. Ahaa, let’s get started. 

You’ve got to enter into social media.

No, you don’t have to enter the category of social media addicts. Just staying updated on what’s going on in the social world (social media trends, reels, memes, etc.) would do. Spare half an hour every day and browse through the social media trends, trending reels, memes, and social media related news to keep an update of what’s buzzing around you and where you can leap in to make the best out of it. 

Let’s take for example the Moye Moye trend of social media, which although is now a bit old, yet we can find brands using it and garnering a lot of attention (views, likes, comments, clicks, conversions) because of it. 

Here, the right moment was when you noticed the popularity of the trend and decided to utilize it. 

Imagine a brand selling car insurance showing an ad of a car getting scratches by falling into a ditch; and at the very moment plays Moye Moye along with the highlight of the importance of getting a car insurance. 

News is the king.

While social media is hell important when it comes to moment marketing and creating viral marketing strategies, we cannot sideline the importance of news, in general. The world is your canvas, the world is your colors. Got my point? Okay, let me explain – We have got to derive from the world what we’re planning to return to it. 

Do you remember the news of Poonam Pandey’s death from cervical cancer at the age of 32 and her next day revelation video that she’s alive? 

The whole buzzword was just to spread awareness about the importance of cervical cancer prevention and vaccines. The day the news about her death was spread, a plethora of nutritionists and doctors started posting about their well-designed health plans to help you prevent cervical cancer. Their sales shot up in just one day, and even the sales of cervical cancer vaccines witnessed a sudden, huge demand. Now this is moment marketing – the best use of it. Now you get it how news is the king, right! 

Don’t be afraid to acquire new skills and learn softwares.

Now when you’ve taken the big step to be the moment marketer of your own brand, you should be ready to acquire some new skills as they’ll assist you in creating viral marketing campaigns. The main skills you’ll require are copywriting, a little bit of graphic designing, social media management, and basic SEO and digital marketing. But you don’t have to learn all of them; you can take help from the following softwares. 

How ChatGPT can help you in moment marketing? 

Although ChatGPT is not aware of the happenings after September 2021, you can still make it assist you in moment marketing. Yes, ChatGPT can help you create viral marketing campaigns. 

For that, you’ve to follow the following steps: 

• Share the trend that you’re planning to use for moment marketing with ChatGPT
• Explain to ChatGPT what you want it to do (what kind of post you want – a mailer, script for a reel, social media post, article)
• Tell ChatGPT what’s your desired outcome (increased clicks and impressions, rise in sales numbers, more subscriptions) 

Here’s a screenshot to simplify things for you. It’s a prompt example from my side to help you out. Save it for future use, as you won’t find it anywhere else.

Isn’t it simple to optimize ChatGPT for moment marketing? All you have to do every time is add the trend, action point for ChatGPT and your purpose. 

Now it’s time for you to get started with moment marketing! Buckle up, make a plan on keeping yourself up-to-date with the trends and the happenings around you, keep upskilling yourself, and master moment marketing. Good luck!