Building contagious products on shoestring budgets

Recently having read the book Contagious by Jonah Berger, I've been thinking a lot about not only how to make the products I manage more contagious but how to do it on a shoestring budget.

Sure, my employer is profitable, but I have a startup idea with no funding. I can't afford expensive ads, and I don't see why even a profitable business should throw money around just because they have it.

So, reflecting on the research that Berger so eloquently put together in Contagious, I wanted to share some of my takeaways on how you can build contagious products, while on a shoestring budget.

Even if you own or work for a company with decent profit margins, don't eat into them just because you can.

Create Great Content

We live in the information age. When people want information, they Google it. Quality information gets shared, and shared content creates credibility to those who receive it. But why?

In Contagious, Berger shares how social currency influences shareability. If someone comes across unique or valuable information, they share it. But they don't usually just share it with the world, they share it with people most likely to care about it.

You can't get better targeted ads than that! Especially if the valuable information leads them back to your product.

Context Is King

Staying on the topic of content, context is the most important aspect of not only product development but product marketing. Catchy messages are so 20th Century. People don't care about cute, they care about value. How can you solve specific problems they are facing right now.

Right now and specific problems are the two key factors in what will make great content. Is it relevant? Does it help them solve a problem right now?

What you're trying to do is set yourself up to be the scratch for the itch of the customer. The "itch" is described as the trigger, the thing that creates a call to action. Will your product be the scratch for the itch? Not if they don't know about it.

Great, relevant, valuable content gets shared. Consistently great, relevant, and valuable content sources get subscribed to. Either create your own channel that potential customers can subscribe to, or guest write for industry sites that already get a lot of traffic. Or do both. Make yourself (and your product) available to scratch that itch.

Emotion Is Everything

The virality of content was found to be largely due to the emotion evoked by the piece of content being read. The trick is knowing which emotions work.

What Berger found was that both positive and negative emotions led to increased sharability, but only certain aspects of positive and negative emotions.

On the positive side, you want to inspire or excite someone. On the negative side, you want to make people mad, not sad.

Berger noted that it's the high arousal emotions that lead to the outcomes you want.

Does your product solve unique challenges in a new and clever way? How can you paint a picture that not only leads the reader to being mad about the situation they're in and then excite them by giving them a unique, never-been-done-before solution to their problem?

Make that piece of content happen, and you're bound to get passed along to anyone and everyone that reader knows who cares about the same problems they do.

Publicity Leads To Purchase

There's something to be said about social proof. If a bunch of people are doing it, why am I not? People imitate the behaviors and purchasing decisions of other people.

Berger explains how making the behaviors of your customers more public will trigger that same social proof mechanism that will lead to imitation.

But how do you make something public without PR budgets or expensive publicity stunts?

I'm not sure where I heard this, but I've heard that the best marketing is built into your product. A product built to advertise itself will solve many of your biggest marketing challenges.

There's a variety of ways to make your product more public. Building gamification into your product with the ability to share accomplishments is a great way for users to get noticed by their network, and your products brand comes along for the ride.

Integrating with other products or getting into product marketplaces gives your product more visibility due to the traffic garnered from these other products or platforms. There's no shame in riding someone else's tidal wave until you can become your own tsunami.

Stories Get Shared

Customers, again, are great marketers. Well, they can be if you've built a great product that solve a relevant need and provides a gratifying experience.

Customer testimonials can be recorded on an iPhone, submitted to YouTube, and shared out to their network and yours. Using those testimonials on your website can also be powerful when potential customers do make their way there.

It's amazing the specificity customers will provide in how painful certain problems are. If you can solve those problems well, they're likely to tell the world about it. The context of their problem, the eventual solution to it, and the results that come from the solution... that's a great recipe for a contagious story.

Wrapping It Up

Did you notice how not once did I mention paid advertising? In reality, the only true winner in paid advertising is the company with the biggest budget and the platform monetizing off of your need to be seen. Nobody profited like Google ($161B in 2019) from Google ads.

You can go the lazy, expensive route of paid advertising, or you can put in the hard work, create great content with value and relevance, and win the market over time. Investing in the market will pay dividends down the road.

Heaven forbid you waste 10s or 100s of thousands in paid advertising only to find out you built the wrong product to solve the wrong problem, and the experience is anything short of gratifying.

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