I learned from the Challenge with Ed Dale, at least 10 years ago, when I first started to explore the world of digital marketing, that there are key distinctions between marketing a product-led manufacturing business, typified by Henry Ford’s motor company and his famous quote, “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black”…
and marketing a creativity or service-led business, in which it’s often relatively easy to custom-design a service or creative solution for every individual client or customer (or smallest viable market as Seth Godin would have it). And Kevin Kelly famously came up with the idea of 1,000 true fans, which further illustrates this idea.
Yet, many of our prospective service or creative business clients want to create an offer to “everyone”, and expend time and effort defining their offer in minute detail before understanding what the client or customer really wants.
In the Challenge, Ed Dale proposed the magnificent symphony in 4 parts…
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- Market Research
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- Traffic
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- Create An Offer/Conversion
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- Product/Service Creation
In other words, Product/Service Creation is the last step in the marketing process, and comes after Create an Offer and Conversion!
Intuitively, this may feel a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
But, I’ve been wondering recently, how many variables do you need to test, and how many variants of each variable?
Split testing is so effective for refining Audience, Copy and Creative – surely it must be worth experimenting with for Conversion, Create An Offer and Product Creation.
What mystifies me, is that even though we design hypotheses to test Audience, Copy and Creative on an increasingly granular level for all of our clients, we have only tested the Offer for a handful.
Most clients see their offer as sacrosanct…
And often see Conversion or Sales Process. as a dark art!
Long story short, I’m testing an idea for a Strategy Session to ask and answer a few questions regarding your Offer, Product Creation and Conversion Process which can then be tested with real clients or with surveys on LinkedIn.
Think of this idea as market testing your Offer and Conversion/Sales Process.
May well be the difference that makes a difference…
Sound intriguing?
Let’s talk…
Email me at Graham@digitalfreelance.co.uk and we’ll arrange a time to get together on Zoom, in the office or over coffee.
P.S. Decisions are always made emotionally and justified rationally!
P.P.S. And the coffee shop next to our office does make amazing coffee!!
