This is where I share my ideas, inspiration & thoughts. Generally though I'm just the Creator of Rockstar Awesomeness and this tumblog is further proof of that.
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In the extremely agile online world, there seems to be a premium placed on getting to market first with a new feature or product. But I’d like to contest the viability and probably the suitability of that premium, since I don’t believe that it’s crucial to be the first to the market**.
Getting to the market first, gives you the bragging rights and all of the hype / publicity that goes along with that. This is obviously great and I’m sure this is every marketer’s dream, since the marketing angles are pretty easy; it is undoubtedly much harder to hype & market something when it already exists, but when you’re game-changing this is a massive advantage. It is also considerably easier to create & build your own share of the market, when no competitors exist.
So all-in-all it would seem like a great idea to get to the market first. This does however not mean that you need to make this the be-all & end-all of your strategy. (more…)
“Marketing is the art of making people pay attention to you without looking desperate – it’s hard.”
- Zee Yang, on growing their websites traffic from 1k to 35k
I absolutely love this quote as it really resounds with my own thinking in terms of marketing. I believe in being every so slightly pushy in terms of any marketing strategy, whilst still being respectful to your audience and extremely sensitive towards adding value and preventing yourself from being spammy.
The title to this post probably sounds a little cynical, considering the well-travelled business mantra that “the customer is always right”, but I’d really like to challenge that point of view in the business environment.
As a company grows, the user- / customer-base normally grows as well and the increased number of people that requires your attention, leads to added strain on your customer service functions. So during this growth period, it is important to streamline one’s policies & activities in such a way to allow you to scale the energy & resources required to service an ever-expanding number of customers.
What I’ve found though, is that some customers are just simply more difficult than others, which is probably an indication of the varying personalities that one encounters in business. This isn’t a problem in itself, since most of the “difficult” customers actually have valid points and they just require a little more attention than average to feel as happy with your company as the “easier” customers. But even though I can objectively say that, I have also encountered the type of customer that is being difficult purely because they want to be difficult. It is also this kind of customer that simply doesn’t trust your company from the get-go, calls of your actions into question and becomes offensive & insulting when they don’t receive an e-mail response within 5 minutes (if this seems like I’m exaggerating; I’m not). (more…)
“If you’re customers (existing or prospective) do not understand what you are telling them; everything you say will purely be marketing speak.”
I wrote that bit down recently as I was contemplating additions & tweaks to WooThemes and realized that as marketers we have an integral part to play in the education process for our products & services. See, I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your products & services to someone that is uneducated about what they are really purchasing and spending money on.
Prime example of this (in our context), would be the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to WooThemes’ collection. Instead of just being able to market them (side-by-side) with our WordPress themes, we’re busy building its own, unique channels, with its own angles. It’d be a lie if I said that it has been easy to introduce our WordPress users to the idea of using EE as an alternative CMS. But why?
Simply put, the only way I ever see a WordPress user switching to ExpressionEngine** is if they are properly educated about the pros & cons of such a decision. So part of our marketing strategy should be to include that educational information and in such a way, interact with our users about those pros & cons. Without that understanding of why they’d potentially make such a decision, all of our EE marketing talk would be limited to sounding like us just pushing something new & shiny at them.
So just something to consider in your marketing efforts: people can’t spend money on something that they don’t understand.
Nice little post about the different business models involved with pricing & selling your products. I definitely second the selling of less (top notch) products at a higher price, as that is what I believe we’re doing at WooThemes.
It’s cool to be featured in unmatchedstyle’s podcast on some of the coolest & trendiest web designs going around at the moment. In this episode, the guys cover websites that uses unique effects as a marketing tool to lure traffic to the site.
If you build a simpler, more affordable alternative to what’s out there already, you can bring new people into the fold. You don’t have to grab a piece of someone else’s pie — just bake a new one.
As I’ve been building WooThemes with Magnus & Mark, we’ve often considered the type of market & customers we’re selling our themes to and tried to figure out exactly how to define that and how that then influences the products we’re pitching to them. Not such an easy task of course…
I would however like to think – and in my opinion that’s what Matt Linderman is getting to – that we’ve dictated a bit in terms of marketing awesomeness within our products. That way the marketing machine is at least finding the customers that are not sure what they want or how they want to use it. It also still remains that it’s slightly harder to market to the experts at the top-end of the market, but in my mind those are in the minority anyway.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently trying to figure out how I can improve the marketing of my personal brand, this blog & my Twitter profile, because let’s face it – things like website traffic & Twitter followers are kind of a ego stroke / boost these days…
But ego stroking aside, I started pondering why people were really following me and why there are some other online personas with massive, massive amounts of people following them.
My conclusion? People follow successful and inspirational people. That’s it. If you don’t provide value on either of those two fronts, I doubt that you’re gonna get a large enough following of people to even consider yourself an online celebrity (so that’s a bit of a #egoboostfail).
And then back to me… (more…)
For the tenth episode of RockstarTV, I’ve decided to become a bit of a sell out and publish a “How to…” episode… 
In this one, I suggest 6 tips on how you can create a hype marketing campaign for product / project launches.
In the episode, I use our experiences with the WOO2 marketing campaign to derive some more generic tips, which you can also use in your future campaigns.
I really think that building hype before a product / project launch is a great way of marketing the pending launch, as well as interacting with your targeted users. The WOO2 campaign was really successful and a week after launch, I can honestly say that the reaction has far exceeded our initial expectations.
In this episode a talk a little about why I’ve created RockstarTV and what my aims are with this venture. I also explain that whilst I may look great on camera (heh); I’m definitely no actor and I didn’t go to drama school.
So with this you can expect a very DIY, authentic and natural approach to all future RockstarTV episodes. You will never see a scripted and / or produced approach in these videos.
Lastly, I also announce that the tech for RockstarTV has been upgraded and my new camera is arriving next week.