Tips
How to Target Early Adopters with Your Next Big Idea
Not to sound bigoted, but let’s just face the facts: some customers are more valuable than others. There! I said it! More specifically, customers who can be classified as “early adopters,” especially in the realm of digital technology, are major players in the success or failure of a 21st century business and/or product. Early adopters are so important because they’re often also your influences; they run blogs, Youtube channels, and everything they say has triple or quadruple-digit retweets on twitter. Get on the good side of an early adopter, and they can bring with them hundreds or thousands of average users. In some writings on the adoption curve and life cycle of new products in our day and age, early adopters are touted as those who can guide a new business across the “chasm.” The chasm is the period of uncertainty where it is uncertain whether a product will make the jump from something a few
people try out to a technology that is adopted and integrated by the majority.
Today, we’re going to talk about how you can help your products and businesses be as attractive to early adopters as possible, and how you can best leverage that attention.
1) Find a genuine need.
Depending on where you’re at, this might be advice coming too late, but the first step to getting your product into
the hands of eager early adopters is to make sure you’re filling a genuine need. People have “cool” ideas all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re ideas that will come to be known as “needed.” Sometimes, however, your big idea can simply be an improvement of another system (think: Facebook usurping Myspace), however the barrier to entry with these ideas is higher because your product has to be so good it entices people to drop something they’ve grown accustom to.
2) Have a proper incentive system.
Don’t just offer to give people free products, give something above and beyond that. For example, you might take a note from the gaming industry: Often times, these companies will offer their early adopters exclusive titles for their profiles or unique character looks called “skins” that won’t be available ever again after the initial testing or adopting period. Think about what rewards could be relevant to your audience in the same way. Maybe you’re launching a
mobile ecommerce platform and you offer “veteran seller” badges or other marks of credibility to those who sign up and start using your site within the first 3 months, etc.
3) Communication will make or break you.
The world we market in today is one of two-way communication. Social media. You know, that kind of thing. You should be regularly reaching out to and interacting with your potential early adopter audiences through the channels that they use most. Beyond recruitment, this also expands to post-adoption feedback and support. Early adopters will likely be using these channels to either get in touch with you directly or to broadcast their opinions about your product or service. Either way, you should be monitoring social and traditional channels all the time to respond in a
timely, appropriate way.
Once you have all of the above in place you can turn on the traffic tap! And the best place to start sending floods of traffic is using is good old-fashioned media buying.
Even More Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing should never be confused with referral marketing as is often the case because the two are very different.
The main motivation behind affiliate programs is financial gain as a way of driving sales while referral marketing uses personal relationships and trust to increase the amount of sales. By relying on loyal existing customers and business connections, a business can use referrals to increase revenue generation. In affiliate marketing, you only get paid commissions when you bring in customers and they actually make purchases.
This marketing program requires the affiliate or publisher to use an affiliate link anytime that they mention the advertiser or merchant on their website. When a potential customer visits the affiliate’s website and clicks on the link, he or she is taken to the merchant’s website. At the same time, a cookie gets dropped on the customer’s computer. The customer then makes a purchase from the merchant’s website. As he logs out, the merchant finds a cookie that belongs to a specific affiliate and thereafter makes a credit for the sale in accordance with the initial agreement.
For transparency purposes, the merchant avails reports showing breakdowns of the amount of traffic from the affiliate’s link and the sales made. This ensures that the publisher is paid his rightful dues without being taken advantage of by the merchant. The commission payments are usually made after certain durations, on most occasions on a monthly basis. At least that allows the merchant to receive a reasonable amount as opposed to the payments coming in small bits.
The most common compensation method is the one described above where the affiliate is only paid commissions for actual sales made. The cost per click method of compensation is not favored by many merchants because there is always the danger of the marketing program not resulting into reasonable sales numbers. An affiliate can also just sit around and earn money for actually doing nothing.
Affiliate marketing is sometimes referred to as performance marketing because of the compensation method.
Affiliate Marketing And The Benefits
Every business desires to make profits by getting as many customers as possible and in the process increasing sales. There are many ways to drive sales, and one of them that is very convenient and preferable to many entrepreneurs is affiliate marketing. Some people are familiar with the term because they’ve probably heard it thrown around from different quarters. So what really is this type of marketing and what does it entail?
In simple terms, it is a form of internet marketing where the affiliate (person referring customers), signs up for a merchant’s affiliate marketing program. The affiliate then recommends the merchant’s products to customers and earns a commission on every sale made.
It’s similar to what used to exist before internet marketing became mainstream; where sales representatives would go out and get customers and then be paid a commission for every sale made. To some extent, this type of marketing also intertwines with some internet marketing methods because affiliates use conventional advertising methods to create product awareness.
Some of these methods include making use of search engine optimization tools, email marketing and pay per click.
Of course, the major benefit of this type of marketing is that you don’t need to create your own products before making money as you can just promote other people’s products 🙂
Give Value And Wealth Will Follow
The way to become successful is to NOT worry about the money you can make but rather on what you can do to help others to reach their own goals.
By being a person who gives value, you will find that the money will follow. For money is proportional to the value you give to the world. In other words; give more value and the cash will follow.
It is an easy mistake to make; thinking about how much money you can make and I bet many new marketers make it even if they don’t admit it. But the sooner you move your focus away from YOU and on to your customers/prospects, the sooner you will become successful.
What can you do today that will give value to your subscribers? Try it for a few weeks and you should be pleasantly surprised with the results.
What do you think about this; are you a value giver and has it worked for you?