This is a great topic, and I knew right away what my answer would be.
We sell women's skirts via our website. Early on, we went down the wrong road by hiring a publicist and having a $10K fashion show to create "buzz" and generate media interest, with the goal of branching out beyond skirts. This was a mistake because this somewhat traditional method (going after magazine and new articles) did not match what we were at the root -- a website. Don't get me wrong: press is always a great thing. But we spent a lot of money chasing it, and it gave us mediocre results. This strategy may have been great for a chain of brick-and-mortar stores or a clothing label seeking placement in department stores, but it did not leverage the Internet in any way. It did not give us what we wanted: traffic. In hindsight, I see that a purely Internet-based marketing strategy would have been best for a purely Internet-based business. It sounds so obvious now, but at the time we were not sure of who we were as a company, and we were caught up by the persuasive urgings of our publicist, who was pushing traditional strategies because that is all she knew. She knew nothing of affiliate programs, PPC advertising, and other Internet marketing opportunities - nor was she supposed to. We were supposed to know about that!
Lesson learned: Know who you are from the beginning and make plans that leverage this identity. Don't embark on a plan that "sort of" fits you.
The second lesson learned has to do with narrow product lines. At first we thought we would start with skirts and expand into other apparel, and even beauty products. Only after beginning our SEO and PPC activities did I realize that a narrow focus can be great! Theoretically, every female English-speaking on-line shopper in the world could be our customer. With a potential customer base this large, there is no need to expand product lines for the sake of getting an even larger base. It is far easier to maintain effective SEO and PPC campaigns when you are focused on a certain product as opposed to a few offerings of many products. As a result, our site is truly about a limited set of keywords and our content is deep on these topics. This is ideal for SEO. [Caveat: we are unusual in that we make each product after it is ordered. So we do not face the dilemma of pre-ordering from a distributor and hoping things sell. Product variety definitely dilutes risk in that case.]
Lesson learned: When the world is your marketplace, you don't necessarily have to offer a smorgasbord of products as though you were a traditional retailer.
|