Sunday, April 26th, 2009
As any marketer should know, the adoption process, or steps that people go through before a purchasing decision, works like this:
Awareness –> Trial –> Purchase/Usage
Unfortunately, when it comes to campaigns or initiatives, awareness is all too often the focus, but the linkage between awaerness and conversion or a purchase is so far away, that it doesn’t always work out well for the brand. Trial is just a step that is way too underrated in the marketing process.
Let’s put it this way: Awareness is sitting at the pub watching an ad on the sports channel for a different beer than what you’re drinking. Trial is your buddy next to you asking you to try his beer, which is also a different beer than what you’re drinking. Which is more likely to work better (assuming the beer doesn’t taste foul)?
With a freemium feature (one where basic features are available for free, but extra features are paid for), you incorporate awareness and trial all at once, and that’s something iPhone app creators are doing to gain users in a really competitive and swamped marketplace.
Let’s see how it works:
Awareness
I’m subscribed to App Shopper and a few other blogs that do nothing but aggregate and share the new apps available on the iTunes app store daily. This is where app developers go to to try to get awareness.
Trial
If someone notices an app from any one of these aggregators, the next step would be to download it from the App Store and try it out. I did this recently with Airport Mania and Best of 101 Dog Tricks, and really liked the free versions, though the features were really limited for the free version.
Purchase/Usage
If the apps blow the consumer away (and if they’re good, they will), then purchase is just one click away. From the company’s perspective, there’s nothing to lose. The more people get it free to try, the more people are aware of it and could pass it on to other people willing to buy.
There are so many apps out there (or products, or services) and it’s hard to make a decision to shell out $1.99 (or $19.99 or $199.99) for your offering when all I have to go on is awareness. Offer something that proves your product is kick-ass and worth paying for, and consumers pretty much will do just that.
Tags: adoption process, advertising campaign, aggregator, airport mania, app shopper, awareness, best of 101 dog tricks, competitive marketplace, conversion, induces trial, inducing trial, initiatives, iphone app, itunes app store, marketer, Marketing, purchase, purchasing decision, trial, usage
Posted in Marketing, case studies | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Louisgray is very quickly becoming one of my top “must reads” whenever something comes from his RSS feed. Late January he alerted the blogosphere about AssetBar, and now he has the latest on LinkRiver.
So we already use Google Reader or some other RSS reader, why LinkRiver? Without trying it out yet, the biggest draw for me is that is aggregates everything from your RSS feeds to Twitter to Del.icio.us bookmarks into one central location. As Louis says:
harnesses your RSS streams from multiple services, including Google Reader shared items, Twitter, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Bookmarks and others, and posts them to a single “Stream”. As your friends join the service, or you choose to subscribed to other LinkRiver users, these small streams become a “River” of shared links, hence the name.
To get a real good idea, check out Louis’s stream right here. I for one am already sold and have sent in my beta application.
The one negative that I can see coming out of it is if someone is pushing similar feeds on social bookmarks, Google Reader and Twitter, and then it could get very tiresome to deal with. I suppose we’ll find out soon won’t we?
Do you keep your feeds/updates central? Or is there some other way you keep on top of everything? Let me know.
Tags: aggregator, assetbar, blogosphere, centraliser, delivious, google reader, link river, linkriver, louis gray, louisgray, must read, must reads, rss, rss feeds, twitter
Posted in social media | 3 Comments »
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Google Operating System posted this earlier this week about yet another aggregator called Readburner, which simply tallies up what’s most shared on Google Reader, and publishes them on it’s website. I’ve already subscribed to the feed, and so far, I like what I’m getting.
If Digg and Del.icio.us are a little to complicated and/or daunting for you (as I must admit, Del.icio.us still is for me), then this will probably be perfect.
And no, you can probably skip Technorati entirely, because not only it is really chaotic to navigate, but according to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, 99% of pings on Technorati are spam. Observing the amount of spam pingbacks I’ve been getting on this very tiny blog alone, I’m inclined to agree. This, coupled with the fact that Technorati’s layout needs some serious work, definitely would suggest that you give it a miss, at least for now. There are other, easier ways to get into the whole social media scene, for observer and participant alike.
Tags: aggregator, delicious, digg, feeds, Google, google operating system, google reader, micro persuasion, readburner, social media, spam, steve rubel, technorati, technorati pings, technorati spam
Posted in Blogs, social media | 1 Comment »
