I saw tons of project presentations and launching plans. With many good ideas in mind, some business owners and marketers often focus on tiny details but miss broader concepts. There are some steps to launching a project that won’t fail. These concepts are three, and they are critical steps specifying the success of your overall business plan.
Here they go:
- Create and launch worthwhile projects only. Whether you work on a product or a service, ensure that it solves a user’s problem—a real, not ephemeral one.
- Tell people about your project. It’s not enough to write an essay about your project and share it on social media. Doing so, you make figments, not distribution. If you’re not Seth Godin or Robert Kiyosaki, the chances are no one will see your post. But even if they see, they’ll most likely ignore it. That’s why it’s critical to communicate with the target audience personally, collect their feedback, and make the most out of native ads.
- Encourage and motivate people to tell others about your project. Marketing tactics a la perks for invites and shares work, but that’s not the point: People will speak about something if it provides benefit. So, improve your project regularly and grow its value for users.
If you keep all three in mind, the product launch will be much easier, and the chances for success—higher.
What can be a problem with this scheme?
- If a project is average, the result will also be average or none. And if a project is s**t, nothing will work.
- If you communicate with potential customers without care, imposing rather than giving value, nothing with work.
- If you press upon customers with requests to recommend a useless product, nothing will work.
Let’s dive into details.
1) What is a worthwhile project?
One day, a friend of mine came to me saying, “I want to tell people about coffee.” As it turned out, he had started a small blog with short texts about coffee beans already, and he planned to publish a corresponding printed media too.
The problem:
Even if we set aside the fact no one (okay, almost no one) reads printed journals today, it’s merely useless in 2020 to talk about the differences between coffee mono-sorts and blends or espressos and ristretto. Coffee lovers know all these details inside out, so my friend’s intelligent blog copies wouldn’t solve any problem or pain point of the target audience at all. And those indifferent to coffee would hardly think, “Hmm, I don’t know much about coffee, so I should learn it asap.”
The decision:
To quit the launch or change the project concept completely.
I’m not an expert in the coffee industry, but let’s say advanced coffee lovers have a problem: It’s challenging to predict what taste the same coffee beans will have from different manufacturers.
Each harvest gives a different saturation and aroma; some grains work better for making espresso, while others are perfect for pour-over, and so on. And it’s important that customers are aware of this problem when buying: They guess how delicious the next cup will be, but they don’t want to guess but know it for sure. Such uncertainty is quite frustrating, isn’t it?
And that’s something my friend could work with: For instance, he might develop an app where users would rate coffee plantations, varieties, and harvests. Something like Vivino or Untappd in the wine industry, it would be a worthwhile project addressing a target’s problem.
2) Communicating with people about your project
When launching a project, please do your best to find users that face a problem your project (product, service) can help them solve—and offer it.
The trick is that you don’t promote yourself at random, and you don’t impose anything irrelevant to users. People won’t see any stupid ads on social media or search engines that do nothing but annoy and frustrate. Instead, they’ll get personal communication about a particular problem they face, where you tell them how to solve it.
The chances are that you’ve seen such communication already: A brand comes to blog comments where people discuss a problem—and offers its help unobtrusively. Known as crowd marketing, this tactic involves direct communication with the target audience, which is an excellent bonus to your content curation tactics for a worthwhile project.
It’s a match! You know that a person has a problem, understands it, and looks for a solution. And it’s your project that becomes the solution.
3) How to encourage people to speak about your project
For people to recommend your product and become your brand advocate, it’s not enough to launch referral programs or offer them perks for “like, share, and tag a friend in the comments.” All these marketing tricks work well only when going together with a project’s surplus value.
Surplus value is something differentiating your brand from competitors.
In the world of content shock and information overflow, brands compete for the audience’s interest online. People visit a minimum of three websites before they find the info and make a choice. So please do everything you can to become the #1 source of information for them towards buying decisions.
What can be your project’s surplus value? It can be faster, better, less expensive, or more comfortable to use than others. Or, it can solve a few problems at once.
The surplus value of the marketing content you share with the audience can be as follows:
- Add links to authoritative resources confirming your information.
- Share trustworthy testimonials that will encourage people to choose you among competitors.
- Publish well-structured content that answers users’ all questions to the full.
- Share comments and recommendations from your other customers and influencers in your niche.
Long story short:
If you’re going to launch a new project that won’t fail, focus on the benefit it will bring to people. And experts will assist you with everything else you might need for an all-inclusive marketing strategy.