By Travis Steffen, a serial founder with seven exits, CEO of GrowFlow and best-selling author of Viral Hero. Follow @TravisSteffen on Instagram.
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Several years ago, I built a product to spark the viral spread of online content. I began with a ton of research meant to uncover the missing element for the majority of products that have zero virality whatsoever. The insights I uncovered ended up being far more valuable than any product I built. You can uncover the full breadth of this wisdom in my book, Viral Hero: How To Build Viral Products, Turn Customers Into Marketers, and Achieve Superhuman Growth. However, I’m going to share a few helpful nuggets here.
A virus spreads by infecting one host, who then comes into contact with other prospective hosts, infecting some percentage of them as well. They do the same, and the cycle repeats. Viral marketing is similar. A user begins using a product, and through the process of using it, they “infect” others. Thinking about it in this way can help you ditch your preconceived notions of what “viral marketing” means. The tips below can open your mind to even more possibilities.
Viral Collaboration
One way to inject virality deep into the bones of your product is by augmenting product value through collaboration. Ask yourself how your product could become more valuable when collaborators (colleagues, friends, etc.) use it together to achieve a common goal. I call this viral collaboration, and it’s easy to see why.
Products like Google Drive and Dropbox and great examples of viral collaboration. You can get value from using each product yourself, but there’s different, yet complementary, value from using these products with others. You store files yourself, but you can collaborate on and use those files with others. To users, it never actually feels like they’re marketing these products, even though they are. It simply feels like they’re getting more product value.
Something that hinders viral collaboration is when a company charges “per seat.” Often when companies have some element of viral collaboration, they charge more for every user who uses the product in an organization. This makes users think twice before sending invites. Some successful companies still do this, but it likely has an impact on their virality.
Viral Satisfaction
One underutilized method of sparking the invite action in a user is to time the ask for an invite more strategically. To do this, try to pinpoint an exact moment in your customer journey in which the user gets filled with positive emotion. One way to do this would be using a tactic I call viral satisfaction.
Viral satisfaction describes a potential viral moment born out of a satisfying interaction with a real human being. If, for example, you have a lights-out awesome customer service team that routinely delivers surprise-and-delight moments, these team members can provide endless opportunities for viral satisfaction.
Most people expect customer service to be a very lackluster experience. If you’re able to provide an experience that blows their expectations out of the water, it’s likely a perfect moment to ask for a referral. You don’t even need to build technology for this — you can just add it into your standard operating procedures for your customer service team.
Viral Incentives
I categorize some viral engines as “superchargers,” meaning they’re great add-ons to the more foundational engines. One supercharger is incentivized virality. Many founders and growth leads fail at this because they assume a cash reward will work. However, cash has subjective value. For some, $20 is a lot of money. For others, it’s not. Cash incentives often only work when a product’s value lies in sending and receiving money, such as PayPal or Venmo.
If a cash incentive is effective at all, it’s likely only effective for your most cash-strapped users and their friends or colleagues. This may not bode well for you if you’re attempting to turn virally acquired users into paying customers.
Instead, architect your product so that inviting others somehow unlocks additional product value for both the inviter and for the invited. After all, your users came to you to acquire the product value you created. For example, Dropbox’s viral incentive was adding additional free storage space for users who invite others.
Viral Optimization
When you think about conversion optimization, your focus is often on your sales process. However, there are more things to optimize than just sales. One of these is where and how you ask your users to either send or accept an invite.
Divide your optimization efforts in three ways: the moment, the method and the message. A low-converting invite CTA doesn’t necessarily signal that your offer is bad. You might just be asking in the wrong moment or using a method that doesn’t click with your user. A/B testing can make it more likely for you to discover your best options.
Open Virality
One underutilized viral engine is open virality. This describes a platform that acts as a marketplace. Apple’s App Store is a great example of open virality. App developers list their apps on the App Store. Those developers then pay good money to drive traffic to their app’s listing in the App Store. In doing so, they’re also paying to promote the App Store itself. Apple’s market cap exploded after the release of iTunes and the App Store — two of the most prolific examples of open virality out there.
While you want to increase the viral nature of your own product, it can often be helpful to leverage the viral nature of other products as well. For example, if you offer B2B SaaS, leveraging the open virality of the integration libraries of tools such as Segment or Zapier can drive growth. If you’re teaching a course, posting teasers on sites such as Udemy and Skillshare to leverage their open virality can be just as powerful. Others drive traffic to those marketplaces, and a fraction of that traffic may discover your product, too.
