"Find the Wave, Ride the Wave" - Achieving Viral Resonance in a Niche

"Find the Wave, Ride the Wave" ?? is how I've come to frame the methodical approach to achieving viral resonance in a niche that my team and I have deployed to effectively bring over a dozen new products to market. Here’s a snapshot of the approach:

?? Market Mastery:

Dive deep into the market trends and verifiable user behaviors to find the wave. Understand what resonates with your audience for maximum impact. The way I frame this is - if you were to walk into a room full of your ideal customers and bring a particular topic up that sets the entire room abuzz with discussion or emotion...what would that topic be?

?? Agile Adaptation:

Embrace an agile and adaptive strategy. In the fast-paced digital world, staying flexible and responsive is key to riding the wave successfully. One way I commonly implement this is in bespoke creator partnerships - I will negotiate 10 different deals if I have to, to establish the optimal creator stable for a project. Don't expect everything to fit into a mold, be willing to be extremely flexible to bring all the ingredients together.

?? Phase 1 - Insightful Research:

Kickstart with comprehensive market and persona research. Uncover the core desires and preferences of your target audience, and build empathy for them. Do a lot of listening. Find out where your target audience is hanging out - this will inform what kind of creators you need to bring to the table and on which platforms you'll need to work on to penetrate the niche.

?? Phase 2 - Engaging Lead Magnets:

Develop compelling lead magnets that effortlessly attract and engage your ideal users, integrating seamlessly into their journey. If you've been listening effectively, you should have a slate of compelling lead magnet ideas. Evaluate them based on user journey, product salience (how well does the lead magnet prime the user for the product experience), as well as development feasibility/resourcing. Pick one or two and build them out.

?? Phase 3 - Iterative Testing:

Constantly test, learn, and iterate. Utilize real-time feedback to refine your approach and stay aligned with market dynamics. If you're an early-stage startup, you may not be able to afford fancy attribution strategies - stage out each creator's posts and observe the user behavior in vintages.

Figure out which creators audiences really vibe, which creator is generating a compelling content format for the niche, and take learnings from each round of testing and inform the other creators in your stable. If one of them strikes gold, set the rest of them to replicate it on the next round. You should have the same stable of creators locked in for at least 3 months and multiple rounds of testing. Just because they don't have a hit on the first go doesn't mean their third attempt, informed by the other creator's successes, won't strike gold.

?? Analyzing User Behavior:

Keep a close eye on how user engagement evolves over time. How deep do the acquired users go into your product? Do you keep coming back, or do they create an account and never come back? Do they use the features you want them to use? Are they activating?

Tailor your tactics based on these insights for sustained growth. You can acquire 1000 users who mostly don't activate, or you could acquire 100 power users. If you only focus on top-level acquisition metrics, you could misunderstand which creator/content/lead magnet is driving ideal results. Make sure you measure not just initial user behavior, but watch them over time to really understand what worked and where to continue investing. This is part of why achieving real organic resonance takes 6-9 months and requires commitment.

? Achieving Repeatable Strategy:

Establish a repeatable organic acquisition strategy that's both sustainable and scalable, balancing efficiency and impact.

Once you identify the winning creator/content/lead magnet combinations and formats that drive your business objectives, you can take that formula and iterate on it. You can continue working with the winning creators long-term, you can expand your lead magnet or put more resources into it, you can create a challenge or trend based on what worked, or you can keep swapping out variables to find bigger fresh hits.

?? Compounding Benefits:

Experience enhanced brand loyalty, reduced marketing costs, and a strong foundation for all your marketing initiatives. This type of diligence really pays in a niche!

What are your thoughts on achieving viral resonance in a niche via a "Find the Wave, Ride the Wave" experimental design?