by Scott on March 02, 2007
In an earlier post I talked about leveraging traditional marketing efforts, even when engaged in internet marketing activities. If you have an online company, traditional media can be used for awareness campaigns. Though many marketing principles are the same online as offline, traditional media (e.g. print, postcards, magazines) often has an added restriction of local or regional scope that you do not usually find online. Traditional media also has more strict time boundaries than online promotion (SEO, etc). So where and when to market becomes a bigger question offline than with Internet marketing. Google Trends can help.
For example, run a Google Trends report to see in what US cities and what time of year are people using Google to search for pool toys.
In this example, the cities and times of year are not surprising (except maybe for St. Louis and Newark – who knew?). The demand fluctuations in the pool toy market are clearly shown in the time graph. If you run an online pool toy store and want to place local advertisements or partner with local pool stores to drive traffic to your site, these cities could be good starting points.
Try Google Trends with your product or common search terms and see if there are any surprises there.
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by Scott on March 01, 2007
Computer World’s Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in ‘07 includes Ruby on Rails as one of the “core technologies that may have the greatest effect on the world of computing over the next 12 months”. In his overview of Rails, the author includes shorter development timelines as one advantage of the framework.
Using Ruby on Rails has meant we can deliver new products and changes to existing products more quickly than we ever did before making the move. To users, this development speed manifests as responsive customer service.
I predict Ruby on Rails adoption will grow at an even faster rate in 2007 so am happy to say “stay tuned” for more details and an official announcement of a new Ruby on Rails training class we will be offering in partnership with another Rails firm starting this fall.
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by Scott on February 28, 2007
LeadsOnRails.com users can now import contact and lead information from text files. We are finding that users are transitioning from other environments where they are either using Excel spreadsheets or using a tool that can export to Excel. This is a small enhancement that is a big help to users. More details are on the product blog.
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by Scott on February 27, 2007
LeadsOnRails has received a good number of positive comments from users. Yet we also received, within a few days of each other a couple of diametrically opposed comments. One person wrote on 37signals/svn that LeadsOnRails.com “is overkill for what we need” while another wrote in the Business Of Software forum that “LeadsOnrails.com is just too basic.”
“Too basic” yet also “overkill”. Comments like these show that an “everything-to-everybody” approach would be a futile effort. People naturally want to say “yes – we can do it”, “yes – our product can be whatever you need it to be”. “Yes” is easy to say. Yet for the sake of a sound business plan and solid product, it is sometimes not the best answer a company can give. Trying to gain a customer who’s needs do not fit into your product or services will likely result in frustration both for you and your new customer. Referring prospects to companies that are targetting their needs is an option that can result in a good relationship instead of a frustrated customer.
We are very responsive to user feedback and feature requests. We work hard to understand who our users are and at better understanding their needs. We rapidly improve products to meet those needs and have received great, positive feedback from satisfied users. Yet we also work hard to know who our users are not. This helps us to not get distracted into guiding the product feature-path based on feedback from folks outside of our target group.
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by Scott on February 26, 2007
The next time you wish your competitors weren’t always chasing you down, the next time you wish you had the market to yourself, the next time you despise those that jumped into the marketplace you discovered, the next time you wish you could just stop improving and rake in the cash: take a visit to your neighborhood state department-of-motor-vehicles office and ask yourself if that experience is the alternative you’d prefer.
I lost my drivers’ license. Not “lost” as is flashing lights and sirens and book-em’, but lost as in misplaced. Sitting for 60 minutes in the unforgiving, but conveniently stackable, plastic chairs in the austere Secretary of State’s Drivers’ License Office waiting area; I kept wishing I could go to “the other drivers’ license guys”. But wait, “the other drivers’ license guys” don’t exist. This note is not about privatization of traditionally government run programs. It is about how important free-market competition is to our daily quality of life and how competition makes business better.
These tenants of capitalism are well known and generally agreed upon. And most business owners think they would give their customers an experience worthy of raving fans even without competitors. Yet experiences with offices such as the DMV show this is simply not true. What are some things offices like this could do without spending exponentially more dollars? How about: a welcome sign that spells out what services are and are not offered at this office (and how much each costs) so that the guy who waited an hour only to be told to go to another office would not have wasted his time? How about a self-service kiosk where the most commonly required paper forms are available to fill out while you wait your turn instead of spending everyone’s time while you fill it out at the counter? How about some carpet, comfortable chairs, plants, magazines, better lighting, coffee, and educational activity pages for the kids? All simple, non-revolutionary improvements any office could do; but why do anything when “customers” will show up at the door just the same.
Be thankful that most of us are in a competitive marketplace.
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