And this is coming from a startup marketing manager. I have worked on quite a few startup products through the years and I keep witnessing the same trend. The startups that actually solve an issue or provide a unique service, don’t really need my help. I might give the initial push, but the product itself creates the snowball effect.
I’m not suggesting you get rid of your marketing guy completely. You will need someone to schedule all the interview appointments with the media.
The hardest part is getting your product to those few outlets that will start the avalanche.
By “hardest part” I don’t mean trying to get on big blogs like TechCrunch. I have personally witnessed the effect of face time on TechCrunch, and I can assure you the traffic is not what it once was (and it was a positive post).
Individuals in forums, on twitter, and selected social networks (you know, normal people) can actually have a major effect on your viral (word-of-moth) traffic. We are past the days of a mention in a major outlet that only has a fraction of your potential customers. You are better off getting a blog article on a smaller blog with less readers that are your target market then a big blog.
At this point in web marketing, and I know you have heard this before, people are more trusting of other individuals than major media outlets. Like it or not, TechCrunch and the like are the equivalent of major media outlets on the web. But everyone continues to push major web outlets and are disappointed if their story is not picked up.
Big web media is too busy working on their next story to truly experience your product. You need to find those that in need of your product. Those individuals will replace your marketing team and will do a better job of selling your product.
Back to the litmus test, if you cant get individuals to tout your product and use it frequently, your marketing team isn’t the problem, your product is.
I think you’ve hit it head on. You really need to make sure your product solves a real problem/pain. If your product doesn’t solve a problem, then you are selling vitamins when you really want to be in the medicine business.
We’ve been going back in our product to make it more usable and trying to attract more usage.
I also agree about getting on TechCrunch… We’ve been mentioned on mashable.com a few times (and we’re very grateful for it!), but we’ve found that a majority of users come in from independent blogs that have a more personal community.
One thing I’ve personally been struggling with (as being part of a 2 person team) is that we’re not very savvy at marketing. We’re developers. We want to learn and want to understand more, but we find it’s tough covering all aspects in depth. In general I think a lot of developers hope for the “field of dreams” approach of building a product that gets mentioned on the TechCrunch like blogs and rise to the top. So as you hint, it’s not uncommon for people to have that sort of expectation.
After the relaunch of our product we’re planning on doing a very regionally targeted campaign. Hopefully we’ll have some more insight into what may work, but we want to try and narrow our approach of trying to market our product and see if users respond to it.
Comment by Tobin — June 3, 2008 @ 5:31 pm
Nice post. I just wrote 16 Tactics for Starting an Internet Company and surprisingly marketing was not on the list! http://www.zurb.com/article/43/16-tactics-for-starting-an-internet-compa
Sometimes we call this Un-Marketing.
Comment by Bryan Zmijewski — July 2, 2008 @ 5:54 pm