Viral Marketing ‘CONTAGIOUS’: Best Digital Marketing Books Reviewed

[transcript]

Hi, it’s Darren here from Aussie Digital Marketing Agency WebBuzz

Today I want to talk to you about an amazing book called Contagious.

And this book is by an author called Jonah Berger.

It’s a fantastic digital marketing book one of the best I’ve read in ages.

Now, the premise of this book is how to build word of mouth in the digital age.

It’s essentially how to make things grow with ‘viral marketing’.

This book “Contagious” has six key principles that it espouses and over a series of short videos, I’m going to go into a bit of detail for each one.

So you can have a bit of an action plan on how to put this into your business.

Before we get started though, I’ll give you a quick summary on what those 6 principles are.

Number one – Social Currency.

So for something to go viral, whether it’s a business or a product or a service, it needs some element of social currency.

It needs to have a cool factor.

Number two – Triggers

Again for something to go viral, the author of this book found that the chances are a bit much high if there are common trigger factors to get people thinking or talking about your product or service.

Number three – Emotion

Emotion plays a really really strong part in all of marketing.

Any talk of marketing (certainly must be an effective type of marketing) involves emotion.

I’m not talking about just product features or functions but actually pushing buttons that draw actions

Number four – Public

So what do I mean by Public?

For something to catch on to something to get a lot of word of mouth.

It has to have very much public aspect.

It has to live in the public realm.

So for instance, if you are providing an intangible service that people can see, it’s much harder for that to get word of mouth and really grow virally.

So for something to have that explosive viral growth, it must be seen, it must be public, and this is a key principle of the Contagious book.

Number five – Practical Value

The fifth principle is Practical Value.

This is really interesting so you would know yourself if the stuff you wanna share with your friends or work colleagues or family often has high practical value component.

And so that makes you look good, that makes you knowledgeable, makes you look cool, but it also helps out your friends and family.

And this book Contagious found that any product or service that was able to scale through viral growth, for the most part, have very strong practical value component and so that’s an important aspect to think about.

Number six – Stories

The sixth and final principle in Contagious book on how to make things go viral is the aspect of Stories.

That is, for anything to really take off and for word of mouth to explode, it’s usually embedded in the story that other people can share.

I’m now going to roll out another individual set of videos over the next for a while, looking at each principle in detail, and providing you with a bit of road map on how you can put these principles into your marketing into your business.

If you are able to successfully implement some of the strategies in this book, you should find that your cost per acquisition comes down and your ad spend is more efficient and the bean counters love that and stand by for more contagious videos coming out.