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The era of creating just anything and sending it out into world to prosper is over. Mass marketing no longer works and neither does traditional research and development. What does work and make money is not building what you want but building what viewers and consumers want and need. Marketing is no longer something that happens after development. Companies cannot design the product and then market it by paying large amounts of money for mass-market ads.
This old school way of thinking no longer works.
In 2002 Seth Godin wrote a controversial book called Purple Cow. In this book Seth laid out why old school mass marketing and product development would no longer work in the future. He correctly predicted the rise of new industries and the rise of targeted marketing as the only way to reach customers in the future. Seth is one of the first to advocate moving marketing budgets and marketing people into product research and development. What is amazing is that companies and individuals both still try to employ old school marketing practices.
Today a product must be built so that it can be marketed. How it will be marketed has a direct impact upon both the design and the success of the product. This is particularly true of an online website or blog. Then when it is marketed, targeted marketing to the right buyers ensures success.
The largest online success stories in the last 10 years have all followed this new model. Apple, Facebook and Amazon have all built online businesses by valuing the marketing guy before the engineer. Doing the same for your new online business or blog will save both time and money. Understanding this new path is key to creating a thriving business online.
Success Online: Find a Need and Fill It
This is one of the oldest cliché’s in the business world. There are still whole areas of cyberspace that haven’t yet been filled. Online education is one of the best examples of an area that has developed well. Educational businesses moved easily and successfully online. Instead of having to quit a job and move across the country to increase skills, there are now online academies that offer everything from basket weaving to six sigma online education. Online schooling is cheaper and easier for consumers. It fills a need for people who can’t quit their jobs and that is why it is so successful.
Success Online: Be Better than the Competition
It isn’t necessary to build the wheel. Just improve it. Steve Jobs of Apple computer was a master marketer. When he returned to his company he looked around at the sea of boring black laptops running Windows and he knew there was a better way. He also listened to consumers who were tired of buying things that failed to work right out of the box. Apple started building sleek cool looking machines that just worked and they put their stores in malls where people could shop for them like expensive shoes. The rest is history.
Are there blogs and websites already in existence that are just like what you want to build? Figure out what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong and do it better. Enlisting the help of a great marketing professional ensures that the website or blog WILL be better and it will attract customers. The product then sells itself because it is better than the competition. Facebook is the poster child for this approach. The site is just a better version of MySpace.
Success Online: Don’t be Afraid of Being Unique
The Huffington Post and StumbleUpon are both successful websites that have made a name by being controversial or unique. A good marketer can help establish where the fine line between unique and weird lies in any particular market. These are subtle nuances that an engineer often can’t understand. For example, years ago (2002) Microsoft developed the tablet computer. However, it was weird and awkward to use. Cool, but weird and it never caught on with the general public. That is until Apple introduced first the iPhone, the iTouch and the iPad, the three products that would catapult the company into stardom. The big difference? Bill Gates is an engineer and Steve Jobs was a marketer.
Success Online: Start Small but Plan Big
The sheer size of the Internet translates into millions of eyeballs. Going viral is only a good thing if you can manage the growth. Your online marketing guru can tell you whether the amount of traffic and PPC is normal or not for a new website. They can also implement ways to either speed up the growth or slow it down. Pinterest is an excellent example of a website that has carefully managed it’s growth during the last year using closed membership. At the same time Pinterest is still building its online brand. The result is a good website that people are eager to join. They join through friends and the site is able to control not only how fast they grow but who joins.
Listening to Your Online Marketing Professional = Money
Marketing professionals live online and they know what they are doing. They have a vested interest in seeing your business thrive and grow. There are so many examples of smart people that have wasted tons of time and money because they failed to value and follow the advice of the marketing guy from the very beginning.
This is partly because engineers have long believed that they sell the steak while marketers just sell the sizzle. This common misconception is slowly changing but there is still an inherent bias in favor of the people that build rather than sell. Product promotion, marketing and promotional products are still thought to be less important than build. Yet both are essential to a successful product, website or blog.
When short on cash for a blog or website know that there are great builders that can be had for free thanks to Open Source and WordPress. However, good marketers usually charge substantial fees for their services. Ironically, the online market place is currently establishing which skills are more valuable.
