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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Win Then Play Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
When it comes to ideas and whether or not you should move forward, it comes down to weighing the risk of losing money, time and other resources to pursue the idea. The key is to minimize your risk by gauging the success of the product/service idea before it launches. We call this “Win Then Play”.
This concept to me is a little like dating before you get married. Dating is a process of building a relationship with someone while deciding if there is a long term future with that person. Win then play is often the same, we want to spend some time with our idea and feel good about moving forward into a bigger commitment. The best part about this relationship is that, unlike marriage, if your ideas only work half the time, you’re actually doing pretty good!
Winning with an idea can come in the following forms:
Revenue: Generating revenue with the idea before the product/service is released. You can do this by pre-selling a product/service before it has been created to see what the interest is.
Improve efficiency: Does the idea, when put in place, make your organization more efficient and therefore warrant you moving forward with it?
Save on costs: Does the idea allow you to save costs in some way? For instance going from a hard copy product to a product in digital format. This can also be a new manufacturing technique that allows you to produce more efficiently.
Once you have established some positives about your idea, you can then move forward with investing more money, time and resources in the project.
Testing product/service ideas is nothing new but it’s amazing how much time business owners waste on perfecting something that they aren’t sure is even viable even when they know they should test the idea. If you have ideas that you haven’t moved forward with ask yourself how you can go about creating more certainty around the idea to empower you to move forward with it.
A Great Marketing Practice is Customer Experience Development Thursday, October 7th, 2010
Marketing is a key concern for many companies, especially up and coming ones. How will I get new customers? is a common question… We look at many strategies such as web marketing, radio, tv advertisements, networking, and much more. Many newer businesses and startups will start by developing their product or service. Once it is to a satisfactory level, they tend to set and forget as they move on to the customer acquisition phase, focusing on marketing and sales in order to actually grow the bottom line.
In today’s ever-connected world of mobile phones and social media, there are other factors that may be the real cause for success and failure of your business and the growth of your bottom line. One of these key activities is developing your customer experience. Any time and money spent here can be considered part of your marketing budget as far as I’m concerned. If your customer has a phenomenal experience, they are obviously more likely to refer you to others. Even more interesting is what happens with social media, user rating sites, and other ways of sharing. Companies have been built and thrived almost exclusively due to powerful customer experiences. Your marketing will be even more powerful when a mix of activities are used however dedicating specific weekly time on enhancing the customer experience will often pay a higher return on your marketing dollars than just another ad.
The End User can End your Reign
One of the key points to remember is the true power of the social marketplace to rapidly make or quickly break your success. It only takes one loud voice to let the world know about their bad experience to start a snowball effect leading to an avalanche of trouble and bad “press”. One should not take lightly what is said online as it is the source of research for your new potential customers and clients. Whether we like it or not, participating in the online social sphere is a necessity, at least to monitor what is being said about our company and industry. Yes, even the industry as a whole… IF the industry begins to get a bad wrap, you can immediately take action to address the industry concerns and how your particular company and strategy overcomes them. In the end, one good experience can be spread world-wide and so can one bad experience…
Focusing on Experiences lowers marketing costs
It is no wonder that word-of-mouth is a major player in marketing, especially for small businesses and boot strappers. One of the best parts about word of mouth is the direct cost being zero. New business that comes on recommendation took no direct marketing and often very little sales effort. The challenge is the lack of control with word-of-mouth since you can’t just directly invest a bunch of marketing dollars to get it to go off. By taking a day to work on the experience often, we are in-fact lowering our marketing cost as we increase the probability of word-of-mouth taking effect. It becomes a “direct” marketing activity. This enhanced buzz improves the conversion on all other forms of marketing as well. As soon as a prospect sees you ads and decides to search out more info, they will be immersed in praise and bliss that leads them to make a quick and easy decision to definitely work with you. And all of this has a direct effect on your bottom line, and that’s the bottom line…
What to remember…
- Focusing time on the customer experience regularly causes improved customer satisfaction (duh…)
- Improved experience improves word-of-mouth marketing
- Money spent of customer experience is money saved on direct marketing as conversion and close ratios improve
- Good buzz causes easy sales…
What can I do?
Now for the self-promotion… Customer Experience design is a key component of the architecture of your business and exploring it is not only a passion of ours but a major goal within the My Business World Coaching Club. Be sure to take a look and get started on your Experience Architecture design.