Phew. Finally… the last section of the introduction phase. This article is all about testing and flexibility. 

In earlier sections, we discussed how to discover and poll your target market, how to introduce your product and build intrigue, and how to use PR as a cheap vehicle for doing that. Now we are going to wrap it up with a discussion on using the data you collected to further refine your strategy and tactics while you are in the heat of battle. 

To begin, let me start with a traditional rule of marketing, and then explain why you sometimes might want to break it. 

Marketing Rule: Branding, messaging and buzz take time (Usually 5-8 views of a message for it to be internalized) Tactics change, but strategies stay the same. 

Breaking the Rule: In the introduction phase, you are still figuring out how your market ticks, therefore, BOTH strategies and tactics might need to change. 

If you asked me a year ago, I would have told you - Create a strategy, create a rollout plan, and stick to it.  Hit deadlines, and do everything you said you would.  While, I still pretty much adhere to that, an experience in the last year made me see things a little bit differently. 

The Story 

Last summer, I took a consulting gig for a few months with one of the bigger internet marketing guru’s, Rich Schefren at Strategic Profits.  While Rich and I are very similar in terms of strategic viewpoint, general business knowledge, and an unquenchable thirst for new learning, the similarities stop there.  

I am all about building a plan and sticking to it. As a result, I think you are better off with a product at 90% delivered on time and according to plan, and will only rally the troops to bend over backwards when you have a chance to get the product from 95% up to 100%.  

He is all about delivering a perfect product, damn the fact that it is never on time, totally screws up your marketing plans, and causes the staff to curse his name and pull their hair out. 

As you can imagine, when his scheduled report was a month late, it got under my skin. (His reports were traditionally used as a marketing vehicle to launch a new coaching program)  When it was a week before the product launch and we still hadn’t even started working on the product, I was about to go postal. I assure you, hilarity DID NOT ensue. 

Because Rich wasn’t “into” deadlines, Brian (the COO) and I created a fairly extensive plan on that tasks that needed to be done and a general launch strategy.  Our reasoning was that we knew that certain things needed to be done before the launch, regardless of the exact direction, and we might as well get the team rolling so we can do more at crunch time. 

We set the crew about working on all the things that would be needed for the launch, and I continued to help Rich further refine the report and position it with the right hook. 

When the report was finally finished, we staged a uTube broadcast event with Rich helping people for free in a marathon 24 hour live Q&A session.  Needless to say, the live video stream was a HUGE hit with over 30,000 people participating. At hour 20, which was 3 a.m. EST, we still had over 1000 people that had been on the ENTIRE time. By hour 26, it had become the most watched stream dwarfing even John McCain’s rally which was being held at the same time. 

We soon discovered that the event was both a HUGE success and a HUGE failure.  In terms of launching the report, it failed miserably.  People were so into the buzz around the video event, they completely forgot the reason we were doing it, to build buzz for the report, and ultimately the coaching program.

But in terms of general marketing buzz, it could not have done better.  Tons of people were talking about Rich and the event.  His name was mentioned nearly a million times in various blogs and tweets over the next 2 days.  We also discovered a common theme that tied all the topics into the report together…a thing we had been struggling with for months. 

In the end, we ended up scrapping almost all of our marketing plans, and spent the next month building the coaching program launch around the uTube buzz, and not the report that took a year of work to create. 

As a result, I firmly believe that sales were ultimately better because of the change. No planned marketing could have built that kind of momentum.  However, in the process we burned almost every affiliate (how gurus make the lions share of sales) by completely missing the deadline and requiring them to alter their mailing promotion schedule to accommodate us.

The take away

No one can really say if my process of working to a plan and launching on time would have ultimately resulted in more sales.  With my method, we would have had an extra month for remarketing, rallying the affiliates, and dotting every “i” and crossing every “t.”

The downside would have been that we would have lost the majority of the buzz created around the marathon event. 

The next time I do a big launch, I am going to try to keep the flexibility in mind.  I will still create a detailed strategy and tactical plan, but I am also going to build in buffers for some marketing experimentation of those tactics that have the ability to heighten your marketing exponentially.  If we find any triggers with that potential, I’ll make sure to alter the strategy to best take advantage of them.

Being the strategic planner I am, I wish there was a way to test everything before rolling out a new product, but experience tells me there isn’t.  Sometimes you just have to throw shit on the wall in the heat of the moment….and hope you don’t step in it on the way out.

Stay tuned, we dive into the fun stuff with the Growth Phase series coming next!