The Price of Internet Marketing Success… June 30, 2008
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , trackbackIt’s do-or-die time for one of my projects that I’ve been working on for a couple of months. How do I decide if a product is ready for launch?
If you’ve developed your own product or service, you’ll realize that the development process can go on forever, as you’re adding enhancements, updates, tweaks to it.
But if you take a page out of the Microsoft book, you should launch a product when you feel it’s ready and launch the service packs later.
Listening to the audio version of Donald Trump’s “How To Get Rich” helped echoed the lessons I’ve learned over the years, you can’t expect to please all your critics, not everyone is going to become a rabid fan. Just go for the ones that matter.
There’re a number of factors why budding marketers don’t see success from their projects, and in extreme cases never get round to launching their products or services.
Here’re a couple of principles to get things done:
- Have a goal
You may not know what exactly you want when you start out, but you need a general direction. As you continue in your efforts, you refine your outcome and move towards it. Being specific about what you want to achieve means you know when you get there. Else you could get a concrete result and not know you’ve arrived.
- Time awareness
This sounds like commonsense, but I’ve known marketers who’ve been in “testing” phase for a year or more. If you achieve your outcome, but take 20 years to do so, it won’t help you. Being aware of how much time has passed will help you get more done in a shorter time. Use a time schedule, stop watch, scheduler, whatever it takes.
Of the various resources available to you - time, labor, funds - you can lose and gain back money, but time is one of the few that moves in one direction - once the time has gone, it’s gone.
- The moment of reckoning
This is the ultimate barometer of whether you’ll be a success…or a spectacular failure. There comes a moment when all the forces you’ve been putting together meets the market. And that’s when you know your efforts have come together, or come apart.
If you’ve ever proposed to a life partner, this is the critical few seconds after you’ve popped the question. Remember that moment of uncertainty, doubt and at the same time, elation?
It’s moving to and past the moment of reckoning that will bring you success.
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The ‘moment of reckoning’ indeed.
When I was a marketer in a fast moving consumer goods company, we had this similar concept called the “First Moment of Truth” when the product first ‘interacts’ with the shopper - in the case of consumer goods, the product on the shelf in the store.
All the ‘marketing’ does is to bring the customer to the shelf - the purchase (and repeat purchase) decision is made during the split second when s/he holds the product - and this is what makes or breaks a product launch.
I’ve always wondered why there’s so much less thought being given to this ‘moment of reckoning’ as far as marketing is concerned - we seem to be always occupied with creating demand (via advertising) and driving traffic (or getting customers into the store). Often, we fail at the final mile.
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