Every quarter, someone asks me how to "go viral." I tell them the same thing: viral is a spike. Business is a slope. You want the slope.
There's a particular kind of marketing ambition I've come to distrust.
It's the ambition to go viral. To ship a campaign or post or launch that breaks containment and reaches everyone, The founder wants it, The junior marketer wants it, The social media agency pitches it as the goal. Everyone's pointing at Duolingo's TikTok and saying: that, but for us.
Here's the problem. "Viral" is not a marketing goal. Viral is a vanity outcome. Companies that chase it rarely build anything that lasts. Companies that build compounding marketing assets sometimes accidentally go viral, But virality was never the goal; it was a side effect of doing the work.
Let me explain what's actually wrong with virality as a target, And what I'd aim for instead.
The three problems with "viral"
1. Virality brings the wrong audience
When something goes viral, the people who see it are, by definition, not your target audience. They're the general public. For a B2B SaaS selling to Heads of Marketing, virality means a million people who will never, ever buy your product see your brand for 3 seconds.
That's not marketing. That's noise.
A campaign that lands with 5,000 of your actual buyers is worth 100x more than one that lands with 5,000,000 strangers, The only reason virality feels like a win is because the number is big, But big audience ≠ right audience.
2. Virality is a spike, not a slope
Virality is inherently a spike pattern. You go from normal engagement to 50x normal, and then back to normal within 72 hours, The half-life of a viral moment is about 3 days.
What's left after the spike? A small residual, Maybe 1-3% of the viral audience follows you, And then you're back to regular marketing work, with a slightly bigger audience and a dented sense of reality.
The math looks like this: a viral hit that reaches 1 million people and converts 0.1% of them to followers = 1,000 new followers, A weekly newsletter shipped consistently for 18 months that grows at 30-50 subscribers per week = 2,400-4,000 new subscribers. Which audience is actually worth more?
Compounding wins. Slopes win. Virality is the casino bet of content.
3. Chasing virality corrupts the work
This is the deeper problem. When virality becomes the goal, the work changes. You start optimizing for shareability over substance. For surprise over depth. For spectacle over insight.
The content that goes viral is almost never the content that builds real authority in your space. Authority comes from being consistently right about specific, useful things. Virality comes from being occasionally surprising about general, relatable things. These are different skills and they reward different outputs.
Optimize for virality long enough and you'll be a famous commodity, not a trusted expert. You'll have reach but not authority. Your content will get engagement but won't convert.
What to aim for instead
1. Consistent reach to your actual audience
The first real goal is: how many of your specific buyers see your content, reliably, every week? Not "how big is my audience", But "how consistent is the exposure to the right people."
This is almost always tied to depth of relationship with a small audience, not breadth of reach to a huge one, A newsletter with 2,000 subscribers who all fit your ICP is worth more than a LinkedIn account with 50,000 followers who mostly don't.
2. Compounding assets
Aim for content that keeps paying out, An essay that ranks for a valuable search term, A framework that gets cited by peers, A newsletter that people forward to their colleagues. These are compounding assets, The longer they exist, the more value they create.
Virality isn't compounding. It's a flash.
3. Conversion rate, not impression count
The only metric that ultimately matters for content is: do qualified buyers take the next step after seeing it? Subscribe? Request a demo? Follow up in DMs? Click through to a product page?
A piece of content with 2,000 impressions and 40 demo requests is objectively better than a piece with 2 million impressions and 5 demo requests, Even though one went viral and the other didn't.
The exception: virality as validation
I'll grant one narrow exception. Sometimes virality serves as validation for a well-positioned piece of content, A great essay that happens to go viral reaches more of your actual audience too, because the viral amplification is happening on top of a piece built for a specific reader.
But notice the sequence: the content was built for the right audience first. Virality was layered on top as a multiplier, The failure mode is when companies try to engineer virality as the primary goal. They build content for the viral audience, and lose the audience that actually buys.
What to tell the team
Next time someone on your team pitches a "viral campaign," ask two questions:
- If this reaches 1 million strangers but zero of our actual buyers, is that a win?
- If we did this every quarter, would we build a better business, or just a more famous one?
Usually by the end of those two questions, the pitch changes. What comes out the other side is usually something smaller, sharper, and more aimed at the people who will actually write checks.
Virality is an outcome, not a strategy, The companies that try to engineer it usually build expensive, forgettable work, The companies that focus on serving a specific audience consistently sometimes go viral accidentally, And that kind is actually worth something.
The short version
Going viral is a seductive goal because the numbers are big, But virality brings the wrong audience, disappears in 72 hours, and corrupts the work toward spectacle over substance. Aim instead for consistent reach to qualified buyers, compounding content assets, and conversion rate over impressions. Slopes over spikes. Authority over fame.
If virality happens, let it happen accidentally. On top of work you'd do anyway.
