Many people who’ve been marketing for a while have heard of the ‘viral effect’ or the power of a ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing campaign. There’s a lot of literature on the subject, but somehow businesses fail to launch and grow despite having all of the best material in the world.
At the end of last year, I did an event with a really innovative marketer/business coach and she mentioned that one of the reasons why so many business don’t work is that the owner has no social media following. I thought it was interesting how such a simple concept could be the reason so many businesses fail.
So far, I’ve spoken about each of the 3 components of a viral campaign – the product, the service and the message – and yesterday on the My Digital Life blog I covered how the Amazon viral launch model could help drive significant growth, but now I want to cover the most important and often overlooked piece of the puzzle: the product.
The best product has a viral power of its own
When you launched Amazon.com, many predicted your success. The product was great, the service was impeccable, but the real product that made you successful wasn’t the page on the Amazon website, it was the concept of the website. I discussed this in the launch of the My Digital Life blog, but it is worth taking a second to go back and revisit that post:
I started My Digital Life with a blog and a collection of short ebooks because I believe that these forms of information are in serious demand amongst people who want to learn how to be more confident in their online lives. So, it’s a $139.00 value in a box.
The blog covers several key areas of digital life, ranging from productivity and motivation through to ecommerce and searching online. More importantly, the ebooks provide easily accessible information to people.
That “clear value proposition” is just as important now as it was back then, and it wasn’t enough to just create a free product. Sure, a free product can be the foundation of a viral campaign, but the viral campaign doesn’t end at the free product stage. Amazon’s viral campaign was about more than just the page.
After you’ve started to create a viral launch amazon you need to identify the true foundation. Where are you starting to increase your business and drive significant growth? And it’s here where you need to ask yourself a critical question: is your product truly changing peoples’ lives?
For that question to truly matter, and for you to drive significant and relevant growth, it’s critical to make sure that people are not only buying your product, but that they feel that your product will help them solve a problem, build a skill, help them make an improvement to their lives, something that is greater than what they need to do to just get by.
Why would someone who wants to make themselves more confident in their online lives spend more than $139? The answer lies in the fact that it can help people do everything from:
Create a blog that increases their business.
Build a podcast for their audience.
Sell their products on Amazon and other eCommerce platforms.
Create an eCommerce store.
