Field of Dreams Infusionsoft Marketing- Build It and They Will Come

I speak to business owners daily looking to market themselves online.  Some are Infusionsoft users.  Others are Infusionsoft users to be.  Others are doing their online thing using another set of tools.

Unfortunately, I meet a lot of people who have sunk a substantial amount of money into a product or service offering and fall completely in love with it.  It becomes their first born son and they are so proud of it.  But they've never sat down and objectively searched out an answer to the question, "Does anybody want this?" and "Is there a real marketing for this?"

I have personally met several Infusionsoft users that spent tens of thousands of dollars (and in one case well over $100,000) to develop online products without first doing some testing in the market to do some validation.

Ouch!  What a painful lesson.

I rarely run into someone who has an product or service idea so good it couldn't benefit from testing.  I'll go a step further.  I  recommend to my customer, and you can go ahead and ask them, that they should:

• create a marketing program first,
• try and sell it and
• ONLY spend substantial money on the product when they have proven they can get opt-ins, conversions or sales.

When you are at a point where you have people paying you money, then you can figure out a way to deliver it.  The worse that can happen if your product isn't 100% complete or if you cannot keep up with the demand is you put people on back order or even give them their money back.  This is exactly where you want to be.  Knowing you have a winner idea and now having to figure out a way to deliver it to live customers who want it.  The a line of customers building, you can confidently spend the money (or better yet someone else's money)  with a definitely return guaranteed.

I wrote an blog article a while back called Evergreen Webinar Marketing: Smart, Simple and on a Shoestring that illustrates this.  Instead of going all out with a webinar, which can take a lot of time and money, try producing only a video.

You don't have to go high tech with video production either.

A video taken with an iPhone with decent lighting is usually a good start.   It may not have the "Wow!" factor of a webinar and it may not look like it's professionally taken and editedo, but it can provide you with the necessary feedback you need first.  If you produce a video for testing and it gets no sign ups, no sales, nothing - you can objectively call it a success.  Your investment is a small one.   You gathered some information that prevents you from spending bad money after bad.  Call it a learning experience.

If instead you get some success, you work on improving the opt-in rate or conversion. You continue experimenting.  Then only when you have numbers showing you have a winner and can calculate a attractive return on investment do you throw as much money and time as you can at it.

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not recommending that people go into slow motion becoming overly cautious.  I'm recommending people:

• fall out of love with their baby,
• get ready to call it really ugly (for us Americans this means be critical) and
• think like a real business person.

You must get objective about this because  we are here to make money, right? (Those of you who are independently wealthy and want to splash money around like there's no tomorrow can call me too.  We've got a really special place for you in our practice.)

Smaller projects like I'm describing here can be put together easily and can even include A/B split testing.  This is where you create two landing or sales pages so you can compare and see which of the two does better.   It can be done with zero branding {which can save you a lot of time and money) with a focus on good copy and maybe a minor investment in video.  That's it.

So my advice again is to:

• Run a test.
• Start to sell something even if it doesn't exist or is difficult to deliver.
• Try and sell the heck out of it.

And only when you have numbers that tell you you've got an idea a segment of the market will buy do you focus your resources on delivering it to your audience.

Hope this helps.