Last week I had a few amazing lunch-meetings with start-ups to discuss marketing strategies and „how to reach a larger audience“.
With the rise of genius frameworks and amazing prototyping software like marvel and invisio it is even easier to create a digital product or service. This is great but challenges the marketing even more. How many apps and tools does an average web-user needs? And how many are available?
Sites like killerstartups.com are listing hundreds of great services – but only a small number of them are gonna make it. And I learned this with my own product too…
That’s why I started to modify the well know innovation-to-market process by adding one more step: „Canvas Marketing“.
Canvas Marketing comes right after – or even before – the market-research. The idea of Canvas Marketing is to create and execute a „real“ marketing strategy and ad campaign for a „not existing product“. Canvas Marketing is close to research but within a real environment. And this is a big difference.
I made three tests:
Marketing Workshops for freelancer and small companies.
Before I even started to powerpoint the workshop I created a splashthat landingpage and up to 20 Facebook ads. The results after 2 weeks: Rate of 0.64%, no sign-ups (150USD/day).
Not a great result indeed. Sure there are a few triggers like location, date, price, targeting, ad design etc.. But I gave my best and 0.64% is definitely not a good results for Facebook Ads. I have to keep this in my mind and may find a better way or improve the product.
„Uber“ for Assets
Since a few months I am thinking about a platform for (financial-) assets. The idea is to skip the banks and create a platform where investors are able to promote their financial products and find investors. I created a professional looking page and planned a serious LinkedIn ad campaign.
Result after 1 week: Rate of 0%. Sure LinkedIn is not Facebook in terms of click rate but I definitely have to rethink this product – and talk with people working in the banking sector.
Online Certificate for Fitness Instructors
Personal trainers and group fitness instructors are well educated in health, training, nurture etc. but not in self-marketing and communication. That is why I came up with the idea of a certificate in „fitness communication“. I created a beautiful landingpage promotion the course and the certificate for USD 95. Once again I used Facebook to run a good looking ad campaign. Result: 2.01% and tataaa: some pre-bookings! That’s is not superb but a good start…
For sure Canvas-Marketing is not 100% bulletproof but a great way to get insights and to think about how to promote an idea before it is finished. In my opinion this is the key in a digital world with thousand of great product launches every day.
A short remark about my test results: I know the fitness industry best as I work as instructor and I have no idea about asset management. Not surprising the fitness idea performed better. But I know a lot of start ups trying to create a product for an industry they don’t know – me included.
If I am doing a good job as consultant I address and help to solve this issue.