Part one of Modern Marketing covered why marketing is such an important ingredient for business startups to marshal income generation. When you think about making a firm successful it must be the number one priority. However, in order to obtain revenue, the product or service must be meticulously designed and developed to cater for market demand. Clearly, there is a period from inception to prepare market awareness all the while product development occurs.
An online application, a website interface that provides cutting-edge-technology, a state-of-the-art system that supports a market need, physical products that people require, and preferably consume is needed to warrant a viable enterprise that excels in growth. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) emphasize the importance of Go to Communities (GTC) to build brand awareness while using alternative and less direct marketing methods is its theory for the long haul with greater penetration, wider reach, and potentially stronger relationships.
This process should be enacted upon from day one of business inception to build relationships that will benefit community assets that can help drive awareness, adoption, and retention. This community building is justly the opportunity to develop new pre-sales. Blogs are a great way to drive increased awareness. On social, current users talking to potential users leads to organic self-qualification and objection handling, thus impacting user acquisition. Conventional Go to Market (GTM) is also a must.
If your community has a forum where users of your product as well as potential users congregate, they’ll naturally share ideas and best practices, and experienced users will lend a hand to new users. In this case, successful users talking to struggling ones leads to community-led support discussions, which encourages usage as well as custody requirements. This kind of marketing, in the long run tends to create a stronger reliance because there is a deeper understanding of product and service commitment. Output from an engaged community most definitely serves as an impeccable compliment to a product-led go-to-market strategy.
When I launched Dri Wash ‘n Guard (DWG) in the latter part of 1994 it became clear that pre-sales were a necessary part of my marketing campaign. Preparation meant creating interest in the waterless car wash and other products. Having no seed money or angel investor meant reducing operational costs while developing the marketing campaign. The finances to employ a bunch of qualified marketing assistants wasn’t available. After six-month’s litigation to secure territory rights, and then spending a week in Las Vegas at the company’s head office and participating in one of its Tropicana Resort & Casino seminars, there were an additional six months to get ready to launch in Brazil.
Not wanting to reinvent the wheel the firm’s tried and tested marketing techniques would have to be incorporated in the Brazilian setup due to the lack of funding. We opted for network marketing known as multi-level-marketing (MLM) as instead of contracting employees to market and sell merchandise the system was the perfect example of Go to Market (GTM) and Go to Communities (GTC) all in one.
Funding provides the backbone to conventional GTM, but without it trying to market and sell using conventional methods requires sufficient manpower to instigate promotional campaigns on a large scale, especially with a completely revolutionary product that potential clients are unaware of. Either that or contract third party firms to spread the word through different marketing channels both face-2-face and online.
Community awareness in the pre-launch stage made sense to start effectively, so thinking of a way to gain traction before inauguration was imperative. DWG’s impactfulness made demonstrating the product a viable scheme at every available opportunity. My upline, Jeff based in Miami bumped into my wife while she was on holiday to pro-sell the idea of taking DWG to Brazil. DWG pre-sale period highlighted GTC sharing though more aggressively directed.
GTC shouldn’t be confused with pro-sales which is Professional Sales and essentially the process of running a business within a business. Sales professionals focus on building trusting relationships with business clients within a geographic territory, selling their company's products and services, and growing the sales revenue to achieve territory business objectives.
There has to be tactical awareness for marketing options and fine tuning for each business, but the rule of thumb is, don’t prejudge before testing market penetration performance styles. Trial and error will pinpoint best methods to include in your mix.
Take care!
Prof. Carl Boniface
Vocabulary builder:
Marshal (v) = to organize, sort out, clarify, put in order
Emphasize (v) = regular verb that gives emphasis to, puts emphasis on, calls attention to, points out, highlights, stresses, underlines
Pre-sales (n) = a sale held or made before an item is made generally available for purchase.
Struggling (adj) = under pressure, fraught, stressed, harassed
Litigation (n) = proceedings, legal process
Reinvent the wheel (idiom) = to waste time trying to do something that has already been done successfully by someone else.
Impactfulness (n) = The quality of being impactful
コメント