Initial Product Marketing – Online Vs Offline
A Bootstrapper’s Diary
In the last post I had concluded that there are a few online marketing strategies that go hand in hand with product development which trump other offline approaches. Any approach that is measurable and can be easily iterated upon is a great initial strategy that can help in validating the product concept against a customer base.
From our personal experience, we have seen that, following a targeted approach offered by online marketing (SEO and SEM) has far better results than following the blanketed approach in offline strategies. The early adopters of your service are most likely the ones that are actively searching for you. And a majority of those solve their problems by searching for solutions online. The good thing about making yourself available to that set of audience is that they are actively looking for you. This without doubt puts them ahead of those who haven’t even realized that they have a need. And that exactly is the risk involved in offline marketing – spending resources on an audience that hasn’t realized there’s a need yet.
Also on the internet, the prospective customers that you reach out to are just a click away from your product unlike an offline approach where the funnel is too deep.
When we launched Muziboo, we busied ourselves with marketing by distributing Muziboo posters and demo-ing in colleges. What better way than marketing our product to the youth which will inturn help us spread like wild fire! Let me hasten to add this: it was all a gross misadventure for all the reasons stated above. And of-course, to make use of the volume discounts, we printed posters in huge numbers. For one, printing in large volumes totally discards the possibility of iterating on the messaging. And another, even if the messaging is right, the cost of distribution is enormous. We have changed our positioning and offering since then (which is inevitable for a startup) and hence couldn’t salvage much from the resources already spent. We still have thousands of them sitting tight in our attic while some of them occasionally get used for brainstorming – thanks to the one blank side!
To come to the point, we pretty much shot ourselves in the foot by spending most of the initial but crucial months on this approach. And worse still, missing the opportunity of having the early entrant advantage with an app when Facebook app platform was launched. Unfortunately we couldn’t keep up our focus on either product development or online marketing with our offline efforts.
Just to give you an idea, we signed up about a hundred users a month during those months. But ever since we realised the power of online marketing we have been growing steadily. And today we sign up around 15k users every month with ZILCH marketing spend. We achieved this rate of growth sitting right in front of our comps from our bedroom office (we have a proper office now though) without having to step out or spend resources.
Well, after this experience would it be terribly wrong to conclude that offline marketing for a consumer internet start-up is a non-starter for a strategy?
