DISQUS

overholt001 · 7 months ago

This is a test comment for the new Disqus feature

George Arenas · 6 months ago

Hello Steve:
You are right, as in life, your business and marketing is a learning and growth process. Similar to product development, marketing is a step by step path filled with trial and error. The trick is to minimize the cost of those errors so you can capitalize on the knowledge. I can provide 2 examples that come to mind.

The first example, is my first experience with adwords. What a steep learning curve that can be. It can be cheap or expensive but it is likely to be frustrating because you are trying to figure out the rules of the game as you are also trying to identify an appropriate marketing approach. In my case, I learned that you can have an adwords ad that costs you $2 a click or less than $.40 a click for the same ad. At $2 a click, I was just about to throw in the towel because it just didn't make sense. Now, I was pretty proud of my ad and was surprised at the low quality score. Actually, I was incredibly frustrated and was about to throw in the towel. Well, within a 24 hour period over labor day weekend I learned the power of changing the destination URL in an adwords campaign. That small line of text that points your customers to a particular landing page makes all the difference in the world. Imagine learning that you can cut your advertising cost by over 80% by discovering one nugget of marketing information. That is the power of trial and error in marketing. That piece of information cost me about $25 to test and will potentially save many thousands of dollars if I use it properly.

My second example is a very vivid memory I have from some TV sales experience. As a small entrepreneur, we had the good fortune to sell our product on the Home Shopping Network. For us it was exciting for a number of reasons. The first was, CASH and the second was education. Sorry but at the time the cash seemed more valuable. However, during the process we learned a lot about selling live on TV. We had a chance to watch a number of people sell their widgets and thingamabobs and we were amazed to see the difference in sales success. As a quick example, we saw an attractive woman go on and try to sell a vacuum cleaner on HSN and did pretty well. She was attractive, articulate and had a good product. However, the following guest was a very average looking german guy selling a knife. Now we felt bad for this guy because we thought he was going to bomb. HSN is a predominantly female audience and selling a utility knife seemed like a real stretch for these viewers. Also, his German accent was so strong you could hardly understand him. Now here is the funny part. As we were feeling sorry for this guy who flew all the way from Germany to get killed on HSN we saw something amazing. He sold!!! Actually, he sold a lot. Actually, he sold out of tens of thousands of pieces, earning more for himself than the attractive female. What was his trick? I am not sure. But I will bet that he went through many series of trial and error to figure it out and whatever he learned it can appear invisible to the rest of us watching. I have my theory and here it is. HSN is a very visual soap box and you have to demonstrate your product to educate the consumer. However, time is tight and you only have 9 - 15 minutes to do your thing. Well, for many products you will get one or two demos but this German was speaking so fast you couldn't understand him but he was also moving, and moving fast. In fact, in 10 minutes this guy cut rope, bricks, glass, leather,wood, etc. He cut everything he could get his hands on except for the hosts arm. I believe that he learned that the faster he cut, the faster he sold and he was right. That one piece of knowledge probably was the small difference that made all the difference. In fact, without that little piece of knowledge, he may have spent his time trying to speak slowly so that people could understand him. He learned that HSN viewers don't want to hear him talk, they want to be amazed by his products cutting ability and his actions spoke so much louder than his words. This is a classic example of the benefits of trial and error and how much it can mean to your business.