Make marketing easier by building Share-ability into your product

There are very many factors that can make a product valuable, but the two that go hand in hand are Usefulness to the consumer and Marketing.

Building products online has always been the easy part.

There are millions of apps and websites that do a whole lot of things.

But for some reason only a few get to hit that sweet spot of being valuable to the consumer and finding product-market fit.

There are very many factors that can make a product valuable, but the two that go hand in hand are Usefulness to the consumer and Marketing.

Usefulness is pretty self-explanatory; it has to solve some problem or at least have a fun aspect to it.

Marketing on the hand can be a tough nut to crack for many people building products online.

So where do you start? How do you make your marketing endeavors a little easier?

By building your product to be shareable.

You build share-ability right into the product itself.

Let’s take two main examples, plus more below:

Wordle

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An online word guessing game that became very popular between 2021 and 2022, players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, a pretty simple concept. Wordle was Google’s top trending search term globally in 2022.

The game was released by Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, in October 2021 and was bought by the New York Times last year for more than $1M.

Instead of simply sharing the game as a link like most apps, web-apps and websites do, players are able to share their daily score in an almost exact square tiled replica of what the game looks like, this tile shows exactly how many times they attempted to guess the word until they got it right.

What does this do? Creates conversation and engagement on platforms like X (Twitter) that in turn brings new users back to the game.

Share a Coke

Credit: Capitalfm KE

In place of their logo Coca-Cola put people’s names on their Coke sodas and branding, it cannot get any more personal than this.

You can image just how much people shared photos and videos of these sodas online.

They built share-ability right into the product.

Spotify Wrapped

An annual marketing campaign by Spotify where users view data about their activity on the platform over the past year, they also share this data on social media.

The data typically includes five musicians a user has listened to most often, the songs which they have listened to most, and their favorite music genres.

Producers of content on the platform also have access to a version of Spotify Wrapped, which includes the number of times their content has been streamed that year.

Every year in December, Spotify gets free marketing from users sharing their Spotify wrapped stats on social media.

Substack

Once you create a post on Substack and publish it, the platform generates images for the post in various sizes for the different social media platforms that you can share the images on.

This means writers don’t have to design graphics for their posts after publishing and Substack gets free marketing as well.

Tiktok

While every other social/video platform restricted users from easily downloading videos from their platforms, Tiktok went the other way.

You can easily download Tiktok videos from their platform and share them on the various other platforms.

The catch?

Tiktok videos have very obvious but not intrusive watermarks with both the Tiktok branding and the users name, thus free marketing for Tiktok as well as whoever’s account the video was downloaded from.

As Tiktok’s content got more interesting, it brought more users to the platform as they now wanted to be able to get this content firsthand.

To build share-ability into your product, either make it fun/cool like Coke or Spotify or have it as a utility like Substack and Tiktok.