You proved your business idea - now what!?
Milestone month!
During the last month, my business partner and I conducted interviews, obtained feedback, incorporated the feedback into our product, and signed the company’s first paying subscribers. It has, in short, been a momentous month, one that has infused both of us with a sense of optimism.
I attribute our modest success to three things: (1) insights into an opportunity born from efforts tangential to our first, and ultimately failed offering, (2) feedback from industry experts who have been generous enough to improve upon our insights, and (3) our rapid incorporation of feedback into our product.
Time to shift into marketing overdrive.
Unfortunately, this is only the first step. Building a successful business, of course, goes beyond proving an idea may work. A successful business is nothing short of an entity that is both profitable and cash flow positive. Concurrent with product improvements aimed at leadership, we have to successfully market our offering. My previous four posts on blogging and social media are merely a reflection of the marketing challenges we now face. In the words of West Wing’s President Bartlett, “What’s next?”
Marketing Methods Being Kicked Around
If you find yourself in a similar position and are contemplating online marketing methods, having an overview of the tools at your disposal would be useful. Here’s the list I compiled.
- Search Engine Optimization: Despite the rise of social media tools, SEO is still the single most cost effective way to drive a steady stream of traffic to your site. Get links and increase your page rank. Do it right and the payoff could be huge. I say “could-be” because you have no way of knowing a-priori what conversion rate you will see. Either way, make the initial investment, discover your conversion rate, and do a cost/benefit analysis.
- Per Per Click Advertisements (Google, Yahoo, etc): This is a simple way to drive traffic to your site. Just pay for the traffic using keywords relevant to your offering, and then using the power of third-party or internal analytics packages to determine your cost per conversion. The goal here is to minimize your cost per conversion. Getting a handle on the rate and inserting it into a nice financial model will also aid your budgeting and planning efforts.
- Blogs & Article Marketing: Blogs and Article Marketing post the “idea validation” phase serve two purposes. First, they let you take the pulse of your users. Their feedback will ultimately drive your product’s evolution. Second, these efforts contribute to your SEO program. Blog posts and articles submitted to the article directories which point back to your revenue generating site increase your PageRank. Third, given a decent audience size, the content you produce may find its way to leading positions on the social bookmarking sites and go viral.
- Word of Mouth & Referral Marketing: If you have satisfied users, do not be afraid to ask them for referrals. Give them something in exchange (feature them on your website, give them a discount etc) for a referral as well. This approach has worked wonders for us.
Final Thoughts
While experts can assist you with each of the above methods, they can’t tell you which of these methods will work for you. The only thing you can do is experiment with each, measure their impact, and weed out the ones that don’t work. Good luck!
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About
My name is Arpan and this is my blog! I'll be writing about things I find interesting, and hopefully some stuff that you might too. Some posts are intentionally controversial and are intended to provoke discussion. Don't be shy!
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