Thursday, December 29, 2016

Marketing Technology Products - our experience

The last three years have given us a good lesson.
I want to explain the progress in the following picture.
 In 2016 we have moved from Early Adopters to Early Majority. Early adopters are the people that look at your product and the fantastic technology and decide to become your users. They are OK with some bugs and understand the situation. They know that they are early users. They expect good price and high value for money.
We have gone through this phase in 2013 and 2014.
Year 2015 and 2016  is different. We are getting people from the early majority users. They expect good system, almost no bug and very easy to use system. We struggle in this area. We still add new fantastic features month after month. It is good for our early adopters but the early majority cannot tolerate this.
Being a techie we always enjoy creating new things. New features. New layout. New modules. New Dashboards. This can be very scary to our early majority customers. 
Let me go to the next group. This is the late majority.  The late majority have another characteristic. They will only use your product when many people already  used your product. Their decision making is based on "how many people have used your product?". It is not based on how fantastic is your product or how the features will help them more successful. Of course they will expect perfect and powerful product. They expect very competitive pricing. But their decision making is based on " how many other friend have used the product".
We are still at the EARLY MAJORITY stage. We must create good product, with fantastic features. Much less bugs. Easy to use.
The LATE MAJORITY will not come in if the EARLY MAJORITY is not won over.
The strategy for 2017 is to woo the early majority to become our user.

How to do this?
We will group our customers in various niche. Remember that the definition of niche is that the people in the niche talks to each other. They are in the same group, using the same software features. That means no significant difference in the way they use your software.
The following are the niches:
  • Retail
  • Distributors
  • Professional Services - lawyers, engineeers
  • Trading
  • Manufacturers
  • Services - laundry
What we will do is select certain niche and dominate the niche until we become the dominant player in the niche.  We will focus our development and marketing to ensure we dominate the niche.

The bowling pin effect
This is important to include in our marketing strategy.
We have been doing face to face marketing to get our customers on board.
Yes, we receive new customers practically every day.
So if we are getting 10,000 customers, we need to meet face to face with 10,000 customers.
That means tens of thousands of sales meetings.
This is very slow and very expensive.
The BOWLING PIN EFFECT will solve this problem.
When we already dominate the particular niche, they will talk to each other.
The WORD of MOUTH effect will come in.
More and more people will become our customer without having the traditional face to face meeting.
Then we can get the 10,000 users, 100,000 users and eventually 1,000,000 users.

This is what we will do in 2017 in order to be dominant in the targeted niche and getting the late majority to come in.
Then the DOMINO EFFECT will move us from GOOD to GREAT to GREATEST.




  


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