I suck at marketing 2: Promotion Theory
This is the followup post to my first one - I suck at marketing..
This post will focus on the theory of the Promotion part of the marketing mix, and is a shortened version of the longer one on my blog, which contain more examples and explanation.
Promotion is the method of attempting to get your target market to visit your Place of purchase. This could be, for instance, your landing page, place of business, or app.
Let's break down the steps involved in doing this.
Promotion Lifecycle
One classic model of conceptualising Promotion is the Sales Funnel. Another approach is the Flywheel. Both of these frameworks divide the process of attracting attention into steps in a promotion lifecycle.
Here's my take on it, the basic Promotion steps are;
- Attracting leads
- Generating interest and trust
- Asking for a commitment
- Encouraging them to tell others
Phase 1: Attract
This is where you're trying to get the attention of your potential clients.
This could be done directly like with ads, or by giving them something of value related to your product, and hoping they'll investigate your product or service as well.
Some general marketing channels used to Attract could be giving talks at conferences, sharing stuff on social media or posting stuff to communities like IndieHackers or Reddit.
Communities
Some communities are more geared towards sharing stuff and some are more geared towards discussion. You need to quietly observe a while in order to best decide how exactly you can add value to them.
Communities are good places to ride a shared wave of attraction generated by all community members as a whole. But you need to be careful and respectful when you participate.
They can allow you to generate a reputation and following if, and only if you provide them with real value. You do not want to get a reputation as a spammer, liar or deceiver. Stick to the community rules.
If you sense that a community is not receptive to you, your content or your brand, rather write it off and jump ship.
Social media
Then there's social media. This includes the likes of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Social media is to me, personally, an enigma. I always feel like I'm shouting into the void and have no clue where to even begin. If you're good at it and don't mind explaining things to dense folks like me, please contact me and let's see if we can write a how-to post together.
But let's take a stab at defining the mechanics of it anyway. Social media seems to be more casual and temporally ethereal.
Large followings on social media can be either totally useless(if most of your followers are low quality or fake) or they can be an extremely cheap and easy-to-leverage launchpad for sales, traffic and income generation.
From my casual observations, superstar indie makers like Mubashar Iqbal, Pat Walls and Pieter Levels can leverage their audiences on Twitter and Product Hunt to a much greater degree than than those of us with small followings.
Pieter in particular kickstarted his NomadList empire by leveraging his Twitter audience and giving them something they found valuable. We'll get to that in the practical post following this one.(@levelsio, if you're reading this, mind if I contact you about some details?)
Phase 2: Generating Interest
You generate interest by creating and sharing content that your target market will find enlightening, fun, exciting or helpful. Or outrageous.
These could be things that amuse them, help them learn something useful(hopefully connected to your product), or perhaps sharing a tool that saves them time, money and hassle.
Examples of these would be blog posts, tweets, infographics and YouTube videos.
What you're doing is linking that positive experience with your product/brand, and slowly getting them hooked. That's why it's called a content hook.
Content hooks?
Good content consists of ideas and topics yours target market finds interesting, presented in a way that is fun, helpful and engaging, and linked to your product and brand in some way.
Ideally you yourself should be part of your target market demographic yourself, which means you'd know what your audience would like. For instance, if you created an app for motorcycle enthusiasts, you will hopefully be a rider yourself to know what riders would want from an app.
If not, you'd need to research your target market in order to learn the following about them; common demographics, needs, favourite communities, income, motivations, slang and lingo, interests, pains, activities, products, social media hashtags and preferred news sources.
And then you'd need to interview members of your target market and ask them what they would pay to solve. Because believe me, you have no idea.
Phase 3: Commitment
Promotion doesn't end once your audience clicked through and has been to your Place.
You should encourage them to commit to at least one of the following three actions, in order of importance;
- Purchase your product
- Stay in touch
- Share your content
The first one is the goal of the whole marketing drive and is self explanatory. Let's look at the rest.
Asking them stay in touch
You want to capture some of those sweet views for later consumption and not waste all the effort and luck it took to get them in the first place. Like Elon, you should aim to reuse your (audience) rockets.
How do you preserve your visits? By asking them to sign up to an email list or follow you on social media (You can follow me @riknieu 😜), for example.
Why? So that when you have new content that might interest them, you can hit them up a little bit more directly and they'll already know who you are.
By collecting an audience you're also collecting a rich library of information. You can ask your audience to bounce ideas off or to get valuable feedback.
Phase 4: Ask them to share with their friends.
You should make it easy for your customers or visitors to share your content with their network. People are more likely to click a link or visit a site if they know their friends have vetted it.
Other methods is to offer incentives like discount-per-share, affiliate codes or gift cards or codes.
The next post...
In my next post I'll try and find practical examples to illustrate the principles discussed. I'll also reach out to some hotshots out there who succeeded with good Promotion strategies, and ask them to give us some tips and advice.
