Yet another reason not to take your eyes off the prize

Seth's blog on adversity and the route to success came just at the right time today. Starting your own business isn't easy, especially when you have such specific ideals of what it will and won't be and when. Ideas that lead to genuine success are bound to be tricky to execute (this is also true of great marketing or great product).

The temptation would be to give in and start making compromises, as Seth says "Why bother? The thinking is that we can just pump some more oil or smile and gladhand our way to an acceptably happy outcome."

That was the phrase that did it for me though, "acceptably happy outcome"; nowhere in any of my planning and rationale did that phrase occur. Genius was conceived to reflect its name, to be outstanding, incredible, remarkable, original.

The same has to be true of all marketing and product development. People don't want to buy stuff they see as just "ok" or "acceptable", they want terrific value, great quality, unique features...

So next time you're tempted just to "make do", ask yourself what you set out to do in the first place and why. I'll bet it wasn't to produce something average.

At what price?

I don't know if it is the stirring effect of launching new product types or the slightly erratic indicators in the economy, but for the last few weeks our office has been abuzz with talk of pricing (just this morning I was sent this post on pricing digital content that is well worth a read); and it's not just us.

So many of the conversations I have with people nowadays, from closest friends to chance business encounters revolve around it. What will people pay? What would we pay? Are we paying too much? Have our recessionary pricing strategies had a damaging effect?

In the post  link to above, Chris Brogan advises against asking your community what they will pay, because they'll low ball it. A valid point; if you're asking, I'm negotiating because you've signalled that there's room to do so.

So how to solve our pricing dilemmas? This is by no means the only approach but it is the one I'm going to try:

1) Find out how much they are paying (competitor research, surveys, market research)
2) Then comes the painful bit - testing. To my mind, the only way you can be really sure of how much your customers will pay for something is to put together a decent message that accurately conveys the value of your product and see if people will pay the price you ask.

The pain bit comes with the fact that you are probably going to have to get this wrong a lot before you find the ideal level to generate the most profit in the long term. Ah well, no pain, no gain as I'm sure you all said as you hit the gym last month!

So many platforms, so little time!

 It came up in a conversation I was having today with a group I was training. The killer question.

"So with all these different channels and platforms and ways of interacting with people, how do we pick what to do so we get the results but don't have to sleep in the office?"

And I feel their pain, I really do!  However I reckon that it all has to come back to the basics. Just because the rules have changed that doesn't mean we jump the gun and forget the sound principles of good marketing that got us here in the first place. Not everything that worked in the old world works in the new one but these do:

Know where to find your people

Often cited as "fish where the fishes are", this is a no-brainer when it comes to focused and effective marketing activity. You have to identify which channels and platforms your customer is using.

That awesome YouTube video you did that still hasn't got any views recorded, that killer discussion you posted in that forum that no one responded to; are you sure, hand on heart that your target audience are definitely actively, regularly using that platform in significant numbers?

But I don't know for sure and I can't afford market research!

Well firstly, yes you can. There are loads of free profiling and surveying tools out there (you've heard of Google right? Yeh, it is that simple. Search and you shall find.) that enable you to engage your target audience in a cost effective, time economic way and find out what their typical behaviours are. Sure you might have to provide some sort of incentive in exchange for the information but what's a voucher or a bottle of bubbles compared to hours of your (no doubt pretty expensive) time spent getting it wrong?

The second point here is that you ought to be tracking the effectiveness of every activity rigorously so if you are getting it wrong, you can stop, pronto! Again there are lots of free analytics programmes and plug ins to help with this even if your senior management team don't want to shell out for a paid for solution.

So there's your answer. Don't do it all, do it right. You really don't have to be a genius to figure it out, you've got nothing to lose except the overtime.