“When you resist something, life is revealing a part of you that cannot accept the present moment as it is. When you are in a state of acceptance are you able to take positive action towards changing something. Acceptance is the key to a steady flow of well being in your life.”
- Jackson Kiddard
” —“The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.”
- M. Scott Peck
” —“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
” —Don’t be scared, public relations can easily be bootstrapped, and can be highly efficient. You certainly don’t have to hire an expensive PR agency to generate good PR.
Start by letting tech blogs know about your product. The odds of being featured in the most prominent blogs are rather slim, so you should consider writing posts related to your industry. If you have a product that people want to talk about, and a few interesting ideas about your industry, this is definitely the way to go.
Build a web-presence, contribute online, and provide valuable input to the people you want to reach. Not only does this generally deliver good results, it also gives you the opportunity to reflect on topics that interest you.
2- AdvertisingAdvertising is worth considering only if your product addresses a need that users express (i.e. things they search for on Google, Bing or Yahoo), or if your product targets very specific users (i.e. people you can target on Facebook based on their Likes.)
You know the drill: figure out which search keywords attract the most relevant users, and create an ad people want to click on. This solution, however, is very expensive and won’t fit most business models. Expect to pay at least $15 per new active user, which might not be profitable for most websites, especially if your revenue model is based on advertising.
3- Referral ProgramsUse referral programs to incentivize your users, so that they refer your product to their friends and followers. This requires giving something away to the users who get other people to sign up.
The results can be impressive if the incentive is real. For example, if you share a link to the Dropbox website, you can get free space if your friends sign up. This is also what we did at Wingsplay; people can earn 10% of what their referees make, which drives our number of new users to grow exponentially.
4- RebatesUtilizing social rebates is the other way of achieving what I like to call “Organic Promotions”.
When someone wants to buy a service or a product from your website, apply a conditional rebate: if your customers share your product through social media, the rebate applies.
This model is especially relevant to e-commerce websites, for which margins are usually high, but for which fierce competition makes it difficult to generate significant sales levels. Online stores give rebates for what they have the most of (which is margins), to get what they have the least of (revenue, sales).
5- PartnershipsPartnerships are the most efficient model by far, but usually require specific functionalities to be implemented.
A partnership involves finding out who has access to your target audience, then providing them with services that turn their audience into your audience.
The perfect example of this is Facebook. Facebook first got traction as a social network for college students. It informally provided colleges with a way to connect their students, before becoming the media property we all know (with more than 1 billion users as of today).
6- Send links to your social media connectionsConsider yourself awesome if you get 200 active users this way.
No matter how great your product is, getting your initial active users is difficult. As always, with digital marketing, you can achieve significant results by being creative and methodical, without having to spend a lot of money. If you are ready to put in the time and effort, your results will definitely be worth it.
“Giving energy to the fantasy of your shame takes you places you don’t want to go. Anger, shame, remorse and sadness are all feelings that are related to the past. Worry & anxiety are more related to the future. This should illuminate the importance of becoming truly present through forgiveness & acceptance of oneself and others.”
- Tommy Rosen
” —“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark…. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”
- Ayn Rand
” —“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
- Helen Keller
” —“I was taught that everything is attainable if you are prepared to give up, to sacrifice, to get it. Whatever you want to do, you can do it, if you want it badly enough…”
- Stirling Moss
” —
Do you think the same thing when you hear the words: “image” and “identity”?
In advertising and marketing their differences demand absolute understanding and appreciation to properly promote anything.
“Image: the general impression that a person, organisation or product presents to the public.”
“Identity: the fact of being who or what a person or thing is; the characteristics determining this.”
The bottomline: “image” is what the marketplace thinks of you; “identity” is what you actually are.
If you were writing a proposal that patterns itself similar to our Working Ideas process, the OVERVIEW would describe exactly what the company is and does. That would be its identity.
The OBJECTIVE, in which you describe what you are aiming to achieve, is connected to “image.”
You might aim to get housewives to see Flix dishwashing liquid as the premier brand for their kitchen needs.
Whether Flix is or isn’t actually the best goes back to the issue of identity.
Solid identity
Often, companies expect advertising and/or marketing agencies to help them change their image without sparing a thought for the fact they might have to change their identity to help things along.
If a company wants the target market to believe it has the best tyres, then it should spend much of its effort in designing and manufacturing really good tyres.
Agencies might promote its tyres as the best, and the market might buy into it initially. However, if those tyres are not up to scratch, eventually the market will know.
Then the market develops a negative image of the tyres.
Identity must support image, not the other way around.
That’s why, if anything needs changing in a marketing strategy, it should always be the image not the identity … because the identity should have been stable from the start.
That’s why a company like Apple can make 1.5 billion dollars in one weekend by selling 3 million new iPads.
Solid image supported by solid identity.
Forward and backward
Here are some other notable differences:
• Identity develops from the company; while image is perceived by the consumer
• Identity is strategic and driven by substance; while image is tactical and driven by appearance
• Identity is active and enduring; while image is passive and superficial
• Identity looks forward to “where we want to be”; while image is a looking backward at “what we had”
Finally, identity is the company’s promise; image is a consumer’s perception.
Deal with that.
Working Ideas next week: Advertising Agencies: the Value Added
