Many of the most suc­cess­ful viral cam­paigns stem from real-world expe­ri­ences that inspire online con­ver­sa­tions. As cor­po­rate social media pro­grams con­tin­ue to grow, we’re start­ing to see more brands bridge their social chan­nel engage­ments with offline and in-per­son acti­va­tions to increase social buzz or demand gen­er­a­tion.

Mar­keters must move beyond the tra­di­tion­al approach of feed­ing out social con­tent to their online audi­ence, and begin infil­trat­ing what’s hap­pen­ing in-per­son to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful acti­va­tion. At its core, a social acti­va­tion is suc­cess­ful when a brand has cre­at­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty for its audi­ence to par­tic­i­pate and engage with the brand and oth­ers. While there is no sil­ver bul­let to devel­op­ing a real-world acti­va­tion that will go viral, there are some com­mon ele­ments of those that have been the most suc­cess­ful. Here are five tips for struc­tur­ing your next offline acti­va­tion.

1. Keep It Simple

Suc­cess­ful offline acti­va­tions are mod­eled like bill­boards: the con­cept needs to be sim­ple and clear enough for some­one pass­ing by to get the mes­sage.

2. Tap Into Emotions

Dove’s Cam­paign for Real Beau­ty cen­ters on inspir­ing women to think dif­fer­ent­ly about their self-image. To bring it to life, Dove labeled two adja­cent doors at build­ing entrances around the world with “Beau­ti­ful” or “Aver­age,” and filmed the foot traf­fic as women approached. Nar­rat­ed by women who had crossed the labeled thresh­olds, the video sheds light on the inse­cu­ri­ties most women hold, as woman after woman choos­es to pass through the aver­age door. As the video pro­gress­es, some bold women choose beau­ti­ful, even drag­ging along friends and oth­er women enter­ing with them to walk through the doors togeth­er. The video is an emo­tion­al tes­ta­ment to the pow­er of improv­ing self-per­cep­tion. Not all cam­paigns are as intrin­si­cal­ly emo­tive, but behind all cam­paigns is a human ele­ment. Focus on bring­ing that emo­tion to life.

3. Integrate Wisely

Many brands dri­ve foot traf­fic at con­fer­ences through give­aways or inter­ac­tive sta­tions. A com­mon pit­fall is that brands focus too much on draw­ing in the audi­ence and not enough on tying engage­ment back to cam­paign strat­e­gy. In the fall of 2014, Adobe aimed to build aware­ness and inter­est in a new Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud capa­bil­i­ty that enables mar­keters to quick­ly and direct­ly tar­get con­sumers who aban­don online shop­ping carts. The social media team placed hun­dreds of mini shop­ping carts around the venue at the Direct Mar­ket­ing Association’s Con­fer­ence in places where the conference’s 8,000 atten­dees would see them. Each cart includ­ed sta­tis­tics on the poten­tial $4 tril­lion in rev­enue brands could recap­ture through tar­get­ing aban­doned online carts, as well as a hash­tag and invite to vis­it the Adobe booth where the per­son who found these minia­ture carts could recap­ture some prize of their own. The acti­va­tion reached more than 1 mil­lion Twit­ter users and was respon­si­ble for 40 per­cent of the booth’s badge scans. When devel­op­ing give­aways, con­fer­ence acti­va­tions or any offline event, tai­lor the engage­ment to not only appeal to the right audi­ence, but also sup­port larg­er strat­e­gy. Remem­ber: qual­i­ty always trumps quan­ti­ty.

4. Be Timely

In real estate, the mantra is loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion. In mar­ket­ing, it’s all about tim­ing. In Feb­ru­ary, we watched the Inter­net explode over a piece of cloth­ing. But just as a tweet about #The­Dress next week would have zero cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance, offline acti­va­tions need to be time­ly to have an impact.

5. Make It Participatory

In the sum­mer of 2014, the ALS Ice Buck­et Chal­lenge drove more than 1.2 mil­lion videos on Face­book and 2.2 mil­lion men­tions on Twit­ter. The phys­i­cal call-to-action cou­pled with call outs on social media drove more than $13.3 mil­lion in dona­tions with­in two months – more than a 600 per­cent increase from the same time peri­od the year before. The cam­paign was suc­cess­ful for two rea­sons: one is the involve­ment of celebri­ties, which added clout and appeal to con­sumers. Not every bud­get can afford Oprah or Justin Tim­ber­lake. Instead, brands can focus on inte­grat­ing indus­try influ­encers to help kick-start aware­ness. The sec­ond is the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry option. Giv­ing peo­ple the means and a rea­son to par­tic­i­pate is more pow­er­ful than ask­ing them to stand by and watch.