Via the Carnival of Marketing, I found a post by Michael Chaffin on his blog, Star in the Margin, that generally states my philosophy on advertising: Focus on creating the right experience for your customer and word of mouth happens. Then, augment the word of mouth by advertising in the places your happy customers hang out. Michael also has a tidbit which we are just now putting into practice:
Don’t try to be all things to all people, especially in advertising. Again, stay focused on a niche and communicate through relevant media.
With WhizSpark, we've taken an idea (leverage social networks and affiliate promotion to drive attendance to events) and built the technology around that. Then, we threw it at a bunch of different markets. We've had success in quite a few from an antecdotal basis. But, to scale any business up with limited resources, you have to pick one. Because not only is advertising expensive when you are targeting multiple customer types. So, is creating marketing material, doing different seminars for different people, creating target customer lists, refining the application for different markets, having multiple pricing structures, etc, etc.
In the next month, we'll be choosing one market. In the next few weeks, I'll be blogging about the different markets where I see opportunities. I am hoping that my blogging friends can help us choose one.
We are in talks with some heavy hitters in a few different markets. The one with the biggest check book might get the goose. But, if all of that fails, we want to do the organic, one customer at a time thing. And if that is the case, I hope to rely on the collective wisdom of my blogosphere to help us make the decision.
Advance comments welcome.
Hope I can help.
Posted by: Noah Brier | December 06, 2005 at 12:34 PM
Technology seminars. WhizSpark would be great for promoting small technology seminars. The 10-50 attendee kinds.
Posted by: Dossy Shiobara | December 09, 2005 at 08:03 PM
Noah. I am sure your insight will be helpful.
Dossy. That has been a thought of mine recently. I've been doing online seminars to show people how to use WhizSpark + the benefits of WhizSpark. As a sales tool. So, I was thinking that using WhizSpark to market and manage registration for online seminars using web conferencing COULD be a good market for us.
The nice thing about it is that there are very little logistics and I could leverage my blogosphere connections to 1) find subject matter experts/companies that want to market/solicit feedback and 2) get the word out through the blogosphere.
Posted by: peter caputa | December 10, 2005 at 10:46 AM
From what I've seen from Whizspark, the events that really work the best are networking events. There is a mutual benefit for all attendants who *want* to network and it's great to know that is what they are there for. Honing in on different sectors that communicate extensively online seems like a good direction to go. As always, the ever expanding party scene is also great to jack into.
Posted by: Kyle | December 10, 2005 at 07:27 PM
Where did you find this guestbook by the way??? I'd like to have one like this on one of my sites!!!
Posted by: Phillip | June 03, 2007 at 04:32 AM