Is Your Venue Marketing Ready to Go Viral? Ask Yourself This First

I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review about viral marketing. It covered the pros, the cons, and a six-dimensional framework for thinking it all through. Here’s the breakdown as it relates to your venue business.

A 2023 report by Hootsuite found something interesting. Only five percent of all content on social media platforms achieves viral status. Much of that content goes viral for negative or polarizing reasons. Five percent is not a large number. The old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity doesn’t hold up the way it used to. We’re operating in a sensitive climate right now, and viral marketing isn’t automatically good for your brand.

Viral Marketing Can Hurt Your Business

Viral marketing can backfire in two specific ways.

The first happens when your content creates controversy, outrage, or discomfort. Maybe the campaign missed the mark, and it comes across as offensive rather than relatable.

The second happens when you go viral for all the right reasons, but you don’t have the systems in place to handle it. Picture this: a thousand new emails, five hundred phone calls, or twenty-five thousand new visitors hitting a website that can’t support that traffic. These are all real problems that virality can create if your back end isn’t prepared.

Before you create viral marketing content, ask yourself this question. Do you have the systems in place to handle it if it actually happens?

The SPREAD Framework

The Harvard Business Review article outlines a framework for assessing your content’s viral potential. It also helps you figure out whether it’s the right kind of viral for your brand. The framework is called SPREAD, and it covers six dimensions.

Socially Useful and Sensitive

Content that is socially useful and sensitive drives shares. Why? Because it encourages people to pass it along.

Two brands do this well. Duolingo’s viral owl mascot leads with humor and social utility. Dove’s Cost of Beauty campaign shined a light on youth mental health. When content has social utility, people want to share it so they can be useful, too.

Provocative

Being provocative is different from being contentious or untrustworthy. It means challenging norms, having an opinion that most people don’t have, and positioning yourself as a trendsetter. Throughout all of this, keep sensitivity in mind and stay strategic in your delivery.

e.l.f. Beauty ran a campaign that exposed the overrepresentation of men on U.S. business boards. The result? It generated 2.3 billion organic media impressions. Those impressions were earned, not paid for.

Replicable

Replicable content gives your audience ownership and participation in your campaign. Often, this shows up as user-generated content.

TikTok’s 2024 “my Roman Empire” trend is a great example. Someone pointed out how often men think about the actual Roman Empire. That single observation spawned a wave of people sharing what their personal “Roman Empire” is. Even major brands like Doritos, Domino’s, Netflix, and Heinz Ketchup jumped in.

Search trends, watch a handful of examples, then post your own take for your wedding venue. Make sure you use the trend as inspiration—don’t copy another creator outright.

Emotional

Activating relevant emotions matters more than activating intense emotions.

Airbnb’s “Airbnb is made possible by hosts” campaign told real stories of travelers reconnecting with loved ones. The result was a 15 percent increase in overall traffic in the third quarter of 2021.

Founder content is one of the easiest ways to hit this dimension. Take Jamie Holland Cooper, founder of the British clothing brand Holland Cooper. She runs an active personal Instagram alongside her brand’s account, posting multiple times a day. Tori Gerbig, founder of Pink Lily Boutique, does the same across her own Instagram and TikTok in addition to the brand’s accounts.

People are curious about the person behind the business. Founder content can be as simple as sharing why you started your venue, what you’re working on, and why you love weddings.

Ambiguous

Ambiguity sparks curiosity and fuels sharing. But ambiguous is not the same as secretive or untruthful. It means being mysterious enough that people want to know what’s going on. They want to decode the message and share their own theories.

Taylor Swift does this well when releasing new music. She’ll post lyrics or album covers ahead of a release and let fans speculate.

Distributive

Content must be designed for distribution, not just creation. Many businesses get stuck in the creation phase. They post a single photo or a few stories and move on, never thinking about a multi-step campaign or how that content is meant to spread.

Distributive and replicable go hand in hand. If content is easy to replicate, it’s also easier to distribute. Focus on getting one of those two dimensions right, and it tends to strengthen the other.

Ask yourself this: is it easy to imagine people sharing or amplifying this content across different channels?

Is Your Venue Marketing Ready to Go Viral?

Socially useful, provocative, replicable, emotional, ambiguous, distributive. That’s SPREAD.

Before you create your next viral marketing campaign, run it through these six dimensions. And before you chase virality, make sure you’ve thought through what happens on the other side if it actually works. Viral marketing can build your venue’s reach. But only if your strategy, and your systems, are ready for it.

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