August 24th, 2010 2

When to Make it Rain (in Marketing)

In business, “turning on the faucet” is a metaphor for flooding a target market with the full spectrum of marketing and business development. It’s when you formally say, “Here we are world! Watch us take over.” Preempted by a series of conscious decisions, you must strategically deploy the full arsenal of tactics at just the right time to achieve success. If you go too early, you’ll misrepresent your service. Too late, and you’ve missed the boat.

My “a-ha moment” came when I was running TargetScope, an interactive marketing and web development company. We were successful (by our own measures), and the company had a growing customer base and profit margin. I thought I would continue down this path, then the website of one of our biggest clients (a very large, very well known turkey company) was hacked… the day before Thanksgiving 2007.

It was a critical time for our client, and we (the development team) were scrambling to help get their site back online. We realized instantly the potential for a vastly larger business opportunity – secure web hosting. Even though we’d made the decision to head down this new path, we didn’t stop TargetScope (as you know it) in the weeks or even months that followed.

More than two years passed before we turned on the faucet and publicly entered the web hosting scene. How did we know the time was right? How do you know when to open the floodgates?

Typical, type-A entrepreneurs will move as fast as possible, and your team will require that energy and drive to make it to the finish line. My warning, however, is not to throw caution to the wind and put the cart before the horse. There are some conscious checkpoints that must be addressed along the way to help ensure your success.

Get the Product in Shape

We made the decision to become a secure managed hosting company in 2007 and spent almost every minute of the next full year questioning what it takes to get there. Quibbling over the “grand scheme of things” bought us the time required to physically and technically build a secure hosting infrastructure – the backbone, the technology, the network, the guts.

During that year, we didn’t launch our website. We didn’t deploy a complex search marketing strategy or ad campaign. We just focused on the hosting solution to ensure it could fulfill the needs of websites in peril.

(more…)