In my last post I gave a formula for visits to a website and listed out five general categories of actions to improve it.
I’ve written a lot about various aspects of this in the past, but some of them are pretty specific.
So I wanted to do a series of posts to summarize each of these five categories. I’ll try to link to other articles on the subject within.
This first one is on probably the hardest to influence factor, and yet, the one with the most potential:
1. Get more people looking for “rubber duckies” (usually accomplished through publicity or offline promotion).
Of course using offline promotion to increase searches isn’t difficult, but it tends to be expensive and is somewhat limited. What I am really talking about here is raising awareness of and interest in a whole category or type of product, service or company.
In the history of marketing this has been done over and over again. How much demand was there for wearable cassette players before the Walkman?
The reason this is such a huge subject comes down to one of the basics of marketing. It is much harder to create a demand (or desire or want or need) for something than it is to just fulfill that demand. Yet the potential for sales is always going to be limited by the amount of demand. 100% market share of zero is still zero.
The greatest and largest marketing companies in the world are great and huge because of their capability of creating demand. Disney and Apple are fabulous at this. What was the demand for Miley Cyrus, the iPod or iPhone before they were created? It was only a potential.
Companies like these also have a huge advantage. They can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a demand. They also have the ears of all the right people when it comes to publicity.
This is the huge flaw in every one who invents a better mousetrap and is going to get the world beating a path to their door. It isn’t that it can’t be done. But the kind of people great at inventing products or services are rarely the people who can come up with a way to get on the world’s radar screen with it.
The business and marketing world know this is the key to Fort Knox. The competition is huge and many of them are well-funded or have an “in.”
So how about your product or service or company? Start with a realistic assessment of the scene. Who are your potential prospects or customers? What are their interests, likes and dislikes? What communication channels have the potential of reaching them.
It helps if you aren’t trying to create a demand but only to increase one – a much easier job.
In the end though, there is one thing and one thing only that is going to make the difference.
A big case of the clevers.
Think about it.
If you examine every case where someone succeeded creating or majorly increasing a demand, you’ll find at the heart of it, a clever idea brilliantly executed.

The Model T Ford
Apple computers
7-Up soda

The story is the same even with social movements, political campaigns and non-profit organizations:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving
54 Forty or Fight
Tom Thumb’s Cabin

It’s been said that at IBM, the employees with the parking spots closest to the entrance aren’t the engineers but the marketing guys.
This is why.