You Don’t Need to go Viral: What Good Marketing Actually Looks Like

Why most businesses do not need to “go viral”

“Going viral” has become one of the easiest ways to describe successful marketing.

A video gets a million views. A brand gains thousands of followers overnight. A campaign gets reposted everywhere. From the outside, it looks like the perfect outcome.

But for most businesses, it is not the goal.

A local restaurant does not need the whole internet talking about it. A law firm does not need millions of followers. A plumber does not need to become a household name. They need the right customers to notice them, trust them, and take action.

Key Point: Good marketing is not about collecting the largest audience possible. It is about creating the kind of attention that attracts the right customers to the business. Nielsen’s research on audience targeting reinforces that point: across 82 digital campaigns, the company found a strong relationship between reaching the intended audience and better sales outcomes. In one advertiser example, partners that most effectively reached the target audience generated an average $2.60 in ROI for every $1 spent, compared with just $0.25 among partners that underdelivered to the target audience—more than a 10x difference! [1]

In great marketing, relevance beats fame

Some of the best-marketed businesses are companies most people have never heard of.

They may dominate a neighborhood, an industry, or a specific customer segment while remaining almost invisible outside of it. That is not a weakness. In many cases, it is exactly what successful marketing looks like.

Example (HVAC): Consider Cardinal Heating & Air, a Kirkland-based HVAC company serving the greater Seattle area. Most people outside the Pacific Northwest have probably never heard of it. But within the market that matters, Cardinal built a powerful reputation.

Founded in 1991, Cardinal became what investment bank Alexander Hutton described as a “prominent brand in Seattle HVAC,” earning its reputation through high-quality work, customer service, and the ability to solve complex HVAC problems.[2] The company did not need national name recognition to build a valuable business. It needed homeowners in its market to know the Cardinal name, trust it, and choose it when they needed heating and cooling services.

That local reputation ultimately attracted private equity. Cardinal was acquired by Chicago-based SE Capital Partners, which described Cardinal as a respected Northwest brand and a strong addition to its portfolio of HVAC service companies. The acquisition also gave SE Capital an entry into what it considered the desirable Pacific Northwest market.[2]

Cardinal did not need millions of followers or nationwide recognition to become an attractive acquisition target. It built something arguably more valuable: a trusted brand among the customers it actually served.

That is the difference between fame and relevance. A business can be virtually unknown to most of the country while becoming highly valuable within the market that actually matters.

The right audience beats the biggest audience (backed by evidence)

Reach is attractive because it is easy to show.

“Your campaign reached 500,000 people” sounds impressive.

The better question is: who were those 500,000 people?

If a small, single-location restaurant reaches one million people across the country, the number may look great. But most of those people cannot realistically become customers. Now compare that with reaching 1,000 people who live nearby, eat out regularly, and are interested in that type of food. The second audience is smaller, but it is far more useful.

Research from Boston Consulting Group helps put a number behind that difference. BCG found that personalized offers—which are designed around the interests and behaviors of specific customers—can generate approximately 3x the ROI of mass promotions.[3] The lesson is not that every campaign needs to be personalized down to the individual. It is that relevance has economic value. The closer the audience and message are to the people most likely to buy, the more valuable each impression can become.

Expensya Case Study: Expense-management software company Expensya provides a useful real-world example. The company uses two different marketing approaches: broad campaigns designed to reach and nurture a larger pool of potential customers, and much narrower campaigns aimed at high-intent decision-makers such as CEOs, CFOs, and accountants.[4]

The broad campaigns generate more leads—about four times the volume. But the narrower campaigns are twice as efficient at generating leads, with Lead Gen Form completion rates approximately two times higher than those from broader, colder audiences.[4]

That distinction matters. If the objective were simply to generate the largest possible number of impressions or names in a database, the broader campaign would appear to win. But if the objective is to efficiently reach people who are closer to becoming customers, the smaller and more relevant audience performs better.

This is why audience size can be a misleading measure of marketing success. A campaign that reaches fewer people can still create more value if those people are substantially more likely to become customers.

Put differently, fewer impressions do not necessarily mean less opportunity. Sometimes they mean less wasted attention.

Even influencers need the right audience

Influencers might seem like the exception to this rule.

After all, attention is part of their business. More followers can mean more views, more sponsorship opportunities, and greater earning potential. Going viral can absolutely help an influencer grow.

But even here, the quality and relevance of the audience still matter.

An influencer with two million followers is not necessarily more valuable to a brand than one with 100,000. If those 100,000 people are deeply interested in a particular subject, trust the creator, and regularly act on their recommendations, that smaller audience can be extraordinarily valuable.

Influencer Case Studies: Research published in the Journal of Marketing illustrates this tradeoff. Researchers analyzed 802 Instagram marketing campaigns involving more than 1,700 influencers, supplemented by eye-tracking and laboratory experiments. They found that the relationship between follower count and engagement was not simply “more is better.” Instead, engagement followed an inverted U-shape: adding followers initially increased engagement, but at sufficiently high follower counts, engagement began to decline. The researchers found that larger audiences can create weaker perceived relationships between influencers and their followers, making each individual follower less likely to engage.[5]

In other words, reach increased, but the strength of each connection could decrease.

An even broader meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science reviewed 251 papers and 1,531 effect sizes on influencer marketing. It found that follower characteristics—particularly the degree to which followers identify with the influencer and their community—were among the strongest drivers of consumer attitudes and engagement. Influencer-brand fit, credibility, content quality, and communication with followers also played important roles in whether influence translated into engagement and purchasing behavior.[6]

Research on product-influencer fit reaches a similar conclusion. In an experiment involving 432 Instagram users, researchers found that having a large following alone was not enough. The product being promoted also needed to fit the influencer’s established identity. When the match made sense, followers perceived the influencer as more credible and identified more strongly with them, which contributed to stronger advertising outcomes and purchase intentions.[7]

Thus, for influencers, then, virality is not useless. Virality is most valuable when it attracts more of the right people.

A creator who repeatedly goes viral with content unrelated to their core audience may accumulate followers without building a particularly valuable community. By contrast, a creator who becomes deeply trusted within a specific niche can build an audience that brands want access to—even if that audience never becomes enormous.

The same principle still applies:

The goal is not simply to be known by more people. It is to matter more to the right people.

Virality Can Become a Problem When a Business Is Not Ready

There is another “dark” side of virality that gets discussed much less often:

What happens if it actually works?

Marketing can create demand much faster than a business can create employees, inventory, appointments, production capacity, or customer-service infrastructure. A post can reach millions of people overnight. The rest of the business cannot always scale at the same speed.

Okonomi Asian Grill Example: A real-world example came after TikTok food critic Keith Lee reviewed Okonomi Asian Grill, a small restaurant in Fairfax, Virginia. Before the review, the restaurant typically handled no more than about 80 orders per day. After Lee posted his video, roughly 400 orders came through in a single day—about five times its normal volume.[8]

The sudden attention created an unusual problem: the restaurant had more customers than it was prepared to serve.

Supplies ran low. Certain ingredients sold out shortly after opening. Only a small number of employees had originally been scheduled to work. The owner eventually took the extraordinary step of asking regular customers to temporarily stay away unless they ordered ahead and were prepared for longer waits.[8]

This does not mean going viral was bad for the restaurant. Quite the opposite—the attention introduced the business to hundreds of new customers and created enormous demand.

But it illustrates an important distinction: Generating demand vs. servicing demand are two different things.

A business only benefits from new attention if it has the capacity to convert that attention into a good customer experience.

Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano makes a similar argument in his research on business growth. After studying nearly 11,000 publicly traded U.S. companies and conducting case studies across more than 20 companies, Pisano argues that sustainable growth requires balancing market demand with the organizational capabilities needed to serve that demand.[9]

When demand grows faster than staffing, systems, training, inventory, or operational capacity, the result can be quality problems, overwhelmed employees, poor customer service, and ultimately damage to the reputation that created the demand in the first place.[9]

Virality simply compresses that problem into a much shorter period of time.

A restaurant might suddenly have a line around the block. An e-commerce company might receive months’ worth of orders in a weekend. A local service business might receive hundreds of calls when it only has enough technicians to complete a few dozen jobs.

In each case, the marketing worked. But the business was simply not ready for how well it worked.

None of this means businesses should fear attention or avoid opportunities to go viral. It means businesses should build the foundation necessary to benefit from that attention when it comes.

Before chasing the next million views, ask a less exciting but potentially more valuable question:

If a million people saw us tomorrow, would we actually be ready for what happens next?

Good marketing creates demand. Great businesses are prepared to capture and service it.

So What Should Businesses and Marketers Do Instead of Chasing Virality?

If the goal is not simply to reach as many people as possible, what should businesses and marketers actually optimize for?

The answer is not to avoid reach. It is to become more deliberate about who you are trying to reach, what you want them to do, and whether the business is prepared when they respond.

We think every marketing campaign should consider the following framework:

A helpful acronym to remember is “D-T-S-M” (Define, Target, Service and Measure) . . .

Note: We know, terrible acronym. You would think marketers like us should do better. But our job is to be helpful, not to be catchy. 🤷

Food for Thought: Do These Principles Still Apply in the Age of AI Search? 🤔

There is one obvious question left: Does any of this change in the age of AI?

Increasingly, customers are not simply scrolling through ten blue links and deciding which website looks most relevant. Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other generative search tools can now interpret a question, gather information from multiple sources, and provide an answer before the user ever visits a website.

That change is already significant. In 2026, Pew Research Center found that 60% of U.S. adults say they read AI summaries at the top of search results.[10] An earlier Pew analysis also found that when a Google search produced an AI summary, users clicked a traditional search result only 8% of the time, compared with 15% when no AI summary appeared. Links cited directly inside the AI summary were clicked in only about 1% of visits.[11]

These trends are accelerating what marketers sometimes call the “zero-click” era: a growing share of searches end without the user ever visiting a website because the search engine, map listing, social platform, or AI system provides enough information to answer the question directly.

So yes, AI changes how businesses get discovered.

Our argument: But we argue that it makes the principles in this article more important, not less. AI merely adds another layer of relevance, not removes relevant altogether.

Imagine someone searching:

“Who is the best HVAC company for replacing a heat pump in Kirkland?”

Traditionally, Google might return a list of websites, advertisements, maps, and reviews. The customer would evaluate those options.

Today, an AI-powered search experience may do part of that evaluation first. It can interpret the question, retrieve information from multiple sources, compare those sources, and synthesize an answer.

That means businesses increasingly operate across two layers of relevance:

First, you need to be relevant to the customer.

Second, your content and online presence need to be relevant for AI systems helping that customer find an answer.

But that does not mean marketers should abandon everything they know about good marketing and start writing for robots?

Google’s own guidance says essentially the opposite.

Google states that its generative AI search features are built on its existing Search ranking and quality systems. AI Overviews and AI Mode use techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation and “query fan-out,” where the system conducts multiple related searches to find information relevant to a user’s broader question.[12]

More importantly, Google’s recommendation for succeeding in AI search sounds remarkably similar to the principles marketers should already be following: create unique, useful, reliable, people-first content; maintain a technically accessible website; keep business information current; and provide original expertise instead of simply reproducing information already available elsewhere.[12]

Google even specifically warns businesses against chasing supposed AI-search hacks at the expense of creating genuinely useful content.[12]

In other words: Do not optimize for AI at the expense of people. Make it easier for AI to understand why you are valuable to the people you are trying to reach.

The “right audience” may now ask much more specific questions. AI search may actually strengthen the case for focusing on the right audience.

Query Example: To illustrate this point, consider this:

Traditional search often centered around short keywords:

“Seattle HVAC.”

Generative search allows customers to ask much richer questions:

“I have a 2,500-square-foot house in Kirkland with an old gas furnace. What type of heat pump should I consider, how much should installation cost, and which local companies specialize in these conversions?”

The second query reveals considerably more about the customer’s needs and intent.

For businesses, that creates an opportunity.

Instead of producing generic content designed to rank for the broadest possible keyword, businesses can create genuinely useful content around the specific questions, problems, and decisions their ideal customers face.

In this case, a contractor might publish detailed heat-pump installation case studies.

In other cases:

• A law firm might explain a highly specific financing structure its startup clients regularly encounter.
• A software company might publish original data showing how customers in a particular industry use its product.

The audience for each piece of content may be relatively small. But once again, the right audience can matter far more than the biggest audience.

AI visibility is becoming part of marketing—but it should not become another vanity metric.

Being cited by an AI system is useful only if it ultimately contributes to a meaningful business outcome.

Which brings us right back to the same framework above:

Define. Target. Service. Measure.

Define what the business is actually trying to accomplish and understand the questions its ideal customers are asking.

Target those customers by creating useful information in the channels and formats through which they discover businesses—including increasingly AI-powered search.

Service the customer when that discovery turns into an inquiry, visit, purchase, or appointment.

Measure whether that visibility ultimately produces meaningful business results.

While the technology between a business and its customer will continue to change; the underlying objective does not.

Whether someone discovers you through Google, TikTok, an influencer, ChatGPT, an AI Overview, or something that does not exist yet, good marketing still comes down to the same thing: Be useful to the right people when they need you.

In the age of AI, the goal is not to appear in every answer. It is to be a good answer when the right customer asks the right question.

Conclusion: Stop chasing vanity metrics

Once again, virality is not bad.

If a campaign reaches millions of the right people, creates meaningful demand, and the business is prepared to serve that demand, that can be incredibly valuable.

The mistake is treating virality as the default definition of good marketing.

Views, impressions, followers, and reach can all matter—but only if they connect to something the business actually cares about. More qualified leads. More bookings. More purchases. Better retention. More revenue.

That is why we believe good marketing starts with a different question.

Not:

“How do we get as many people as possible to see this?”

But:

“Who actually needs to see this”

“What do we want them to do”

“What happens when they do it?”

This shift changes the focus from fame → relevance. From audience size to audience quality. From impressions to outcomes. And from chasing a temporary spike in attention to building a repeatable system for growth.

That is also the logic behind the framework we outlined above:

Define. Target. Service. Measure.

Define what success actually looks like. Target the people most likely to matter. Make sure the business can serve the demand you create. Then measure whether the campaign actually moved the business forward.

Because a business does not need everyone to know its name. It needs enough of the right people to know it, trust it, choose it, and come back.

You do not need to go viral—you need marketing that works.

Sources

1. [1] ↩ Nielsen. “Bridging the Gap: Better Audience Targeting with Context and Behavior Data.” May 2022. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/bridging-the-gap-better-audience-targeting-with-context-and-behavior-data/
2. [2] ↩^a ↩^b Alexander Hutton. “Cardinal Heating & Air Has Been Acquired by SE Capital.” April 11, 2024. https://alexanderhutton.com/post/291068
3. [3] ↩ Abraham, Mark, TR Geng, Florian Kogler, and Lauren Taylor. “What Consumers Want from Personalization.” Boston Consulting Group, December 12, 2024. BCG — What Consumers Want from Personalization
4. [4] ↩^a ↩^b LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. “Balancing Short- and Long-Term Lead Generation on LinkedIn: Expensya Case Study.” Accessed September 11, 2026. LinkedIn — Expensya Case Study
5. [5] ↩ Wies, Simone, Alexander Bleier, and Alexander Edeling. “Finding Goldilocks Influencers: How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagement.” Journal of Marketing 87, no. 3 (2023): 383–405. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221125131.
   Journal of Marketing — Finding Goldilocks Influencers
6. [6] ↩ Pan, Meizhi, Markus Blut, Arezou Ghiassaleh, and Zach W. Y. Lee. “Influencer Marketing Effectiveness: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 53 (2025): 52–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01052-7.
   Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science — Influencer Marketing Effectiveness
7. [7] ↩ Janssen, Loes, Alexander P. Schouten, and Emmelyn A. J. Croes. “Influencer Advertising on Instagram: Product-Influencer Fit and Number of Followers Affect Advertising Outcomes and Influencer Evaluations via Credibility and Identification.” International Journal of Advertising 41, no. 1 (2022): 101–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2021.1994205.
   International Journal of Advertising — Influencer Advertising on Instagram
8. [8] ↩^a ↩^b Carman, Tim, and Warren Rojas. “‘Keith Lee’ Effect from TikTok Food Critic Hits D.C.-Area Restaurants.” The Washington Post, August 22, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/08/22/keith-lee-tiktok-restaurant-fairfax-okonomi/
9. [9] ↩^a ↩^b Pisano, Gary P. “How Fast Should Your Company Really Grow?” Harvard Business Review, March–April 2024. https://hbr.org/2024/03/how-fast-should-your-company-really-grow.
10. [10] ↩ Gottfried, Jeffrey, William Bishop, Monica Anderson, Michelle Faverio, Eugenie Park, and Colleen McClain. “Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact.” Pew Research Center, June 17, 2026. The survey found that 60% of U.S. adults say they read AI summaries at the top of search results.
    Pew Research Center — Americans and AI 2026
11. [11] ↩ Chapekis, Athena, and Anna Lieb. “Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results.” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025. Pew found traditional-result clicks occurred on 8% of searches with AI summaries versus 15% without them; links within the AI summaries themselves were clicked in about 1% of visits.
    Pew Research Center — Google Users and AI Search Summaries
12. [12] ↩^a ↩^b ↩^c Google Search Central. “Optimizing Your Website for Generative AI Features on Google Search.” Last updated July 10, 2026. Google says generative Search remains rooted in its core ranking and quality systems and recommends unique, useful, people-first content rather than special “GEO” or “AEO” hacks.
    Google Search Central — Generative AI Search Guidance

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