Some key takeaways from the article, with my own spin on them:
- Set goals for your marketing efforts. I'd like to think this is obvious, but all too often it gets ignored. Before you embark on any marketing effort, you really need to understand what you want to achieve, and how your going to measure your progress. This is very important if you're going to be spending precious resources like money or time... and you want to make sure you're getting the most out of those expenditures.
- Listen to what customers are saying. If you've already got products out there, what are your customers telling you? If you don't have a product out there yet, what are customers saying about similar products? There are tools to help you figure this out, as the article mentions. Use this info to refine your own product development and marketing efforts. You may find a different reason for people to buy your product that you hadn't thought of, or a different audience to reach.
- Check out the competition. Whether the competition is in the future or is already stealing your market share, you need to figure out what they're doing and how it affects what you should be doing.
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Set goals for your marketing efforts:
ReplyDeleteThe problem for me is that marketing is so very ephemeral, with no real way for me to show direct impact, is this marketing effort working or is word of mouth traveling faster than the speed of the social network, and which network is having more impact.
There's a few different issues in your comment. One is that you call marketing "ephemeral"; if you really want to get an effect, your marketing needs to be consistent over time. At least, have a consistent message that may be repeated through various means... the totality adding up to your marketing impact. Measuring the effect of one tweet can be impossible.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, it is necessary to figure out ways to measure your marketing before you begin. Measuring after the fact is often difficult or impossible. For instance, let's say you want to spread the word about a new game in a series of tweets, and facebook posts... try and lead all the people who see those to a unique landing page that's distinct from where your banner ads are going, or where the fliers you handed out at a convention led to. You'll at least be able to tell how many visitors you brought in via each marketing method. Even better would be telling how many of those converted to sales.
This topic is worthy of a blog post or two at some point...