The 4 Conceptual Strategies for Marketing Your Internet Company

A group of my friends recently had a discussion about how to market our new slew of web products.  I was sad to say that in my perspective, there is absolutely no silver bullet, one size fits all approach to marketing an internet business.  This is mostly a result of the fact that the target users/customers think about and interact with every product in a different way.  So choosing a winning set of marketing strategies differs accordingly.

What does seem to be valuable is to try to divide up the different marketing strategies for web products into different conceptual buckets.  The 4 buckets I came up with were: Invites, Poster Customer, Publicity (Including Stunts, Advertising and Blogging), and Word of Mouth.  Whenever you’re trying to determine what strategies are best for your business, it can be helpful to pick and choose from all four categories to start with (and see what sticks).  However in the end, devoting the majority of effort to the one or two conceptual buckets that work will likely pay off the most.

1. Intrinsically Viral (Invites)
Businesses like Facebook and YouTube can be classified as intrinsically viral because of 2 simple facts: because (1) a single user legitimately uses the web app often (multiple times a day) and (2) when someone invites another user, the invitee is immediately in the position to be a user from Minute One - before they forget about the app. Good examples are Massively Multiplayer games, Email, and Messaging apps. However, I don’t think that many web apps fall into this category because many web apps try to solve a semi-specific, non-every-day problem.  But if an app is intrinsically viral, they’ll explode like no one’s business, on invites alone.

2. Poster Customer
Other web apps can get to fame by having one single killer customer, because every other potential user is so intertwined with that customer. Ruby on Rails moving to GitHub made them, and that was pure genius (and incredibly useful to developers). I see this with Apture, too, when they integrated with the Washington Post.  In general, high-profile integrations can be big wins in the Poster Customer department.  If a huge base of your potential users are linked to a single product or organization, start imagining ways to convert that product or organization to your web app!

3. Publicity (Including Stunts, Advertising, and Blogging)
The publicity avenue his is where your average webapp (and average company) would fall. Most businesses need something that gets them into related media publications or videos which are important to their customers. Great examples from the past are when Taco Bell claimed they bought the Liberty Bell on April fools, to Jared the Subway guy getting the attention of Oprah. There’s no limit to the possibilities in ways to get publicity, but your company doesn’t directly get multiplicative benefits from each stunt thereafter - just additive effects.  Publicity can be an important place to start for any new product, but it doesn’t scale nearly as well, because you have to keep raising the bar.

If you do go down this route, make sure you read Made to Stick.  While the first quarter of the book is mind-numbingly dull (they need to follow their own advice!), the latter quarters are totally worth it, and will change how you attack all forms of publicity.

4. Word of Mouth, Most Importantly! (Translation: Increase Per-User Usage)
The Word of Mouth is probably the holy grail for most products that don’t have any intrinsic ‘virality’. Word of mouth is multiplicative, so once you get some base set of users spreading the word, the tidal wave cannot be stopped.

The trickiness with word of mouth as a strategy is that it relies heavily on the amount of exposure (usage) that a single person has.  Very few people will talk about an app that they use once a month, but many will be happy to talk about apps that they use daily or multiple times a day.  As an app’s exposure rate to a user goes down, the usefulness has to go way up (reaching the level of being an absolutely necessity) for word of mouth to take place.  So while you might focus on making your app absolutely necessary for your users, you might just aggressively increase the amount of exposure every existing user has to your app. This in-turn means creating features which provide users a real incentive to return to your app every day on their own accord (as opposed to coercing them to).

If you look at almost every single sensational web application - or even business - you’ll find regular usage by each user. Google, any successful email site, YouTube, Facebook, World of Warcraft - heck, even Coca Cola (drunk multiple times a day) - every single one of these sensations had a reason to be used multiple, multiple times a day for real reasons that benefit the user.

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Those are the 4 conceptual strategies I bucket marketing into, anyway, and I’d love to hear your insights as well.  Leave them in the comments!

And once again - if you have a new web app, try a little bit of everything to start with.  But sooner or later, you’re going to find that one or two of those types of strategies wins out for your particular product!