In this episode you’ll hear me answer a question about creative ways to get a product out to partners and consumers.
So, listen here as I discuss this!
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Transcript:
Hey Orren it’s Dragos, best of luck with a podcast it sounds really exciting and I’ve got a marketing question that I’m hoping you can help with we’ve recently started signature board games and we’ve pretty much finished that first game called flip and fish well we’ve decided to do is do a small print run instead of doing a Kickstarter or something like that because we’ve got really good feedback from people who are basically saying we want to buy this right now we want to take advantage of that and sell a few a few copies and then reinvest that that back in the business and possibly later on Kickstarter etc later on so the question is once we print out press batch which will be about 500 what’s the most creative or what are some ideas for us to marketers either to shops or to clients in a creative way to try and get them out there considering it’s a very crowded market and new designers with one game usually have a hard time getting noticed yeah any thoughts comments feedback would be much appreciated it was thought about things like partnering up that side of the industry but yeah any anything else yeah?
Answer
Hello that is a great question and I just want to congratulate you and applaud you have been following your journey I think what you’ve done and how to take an action on this is phenomenal and also in that you go in a small print run especially for a physical product is an amazing strategy without you know going out and spending thousands of dollars and tons of your time and betting the farm in case this thing does or does not work so doing a really small one rania is a really fantastic strategy so big Pats on back for that so I’m gonna tell you a question with two different ways I’m going to talk about what you’re selling and then how you are selling it so I really want you to think about what it is that you are selling now you’re going to a market where there are plenty of players and plenty of competing products now that’s not a bad thing because consumers love what you’re doing and you know the industry has been around for a really long time but which also which means that people are interested in purchasing what you have to offer but because there’s so much noise out there I really want you to think about how you’re going to position yourself amongst all of the competitors what is it that you do or what is it that your product does that stands out from everyone else now in the PR and the publicity game this is called a news anchor or certainly another news anchor a publicity angle or a PR angle so what is that that’s going to jump out and hook people’s attention because you are unique or different or better or faster than all of the other things that are on the market now yeah the product will solve that but you have to break through all of the noise that’s out there so what is it that you’re yes it is a board game but what is that that people are going to get out of it but also what is the thing that is going to grab their attention now in terms of how you’re selling I want you to go back to the cause I recorded about the fair value line and also how McDonald’s acquires customers and makes a profit and I want you to apply those two different ideas to what you’re currently doing now cards against humanity’ does this in an interesting way and that’s the only thing that’s coming to my mind on the spot is that they do expansion packs for all of their cards so you come in and buy the game and you have a fantastic time and you know usually board games are just a once-off purchase whereas cards against humanity’ they go out and do an expansion pack and I think and I understand this multiple expansion packs so they’re making a little bit more money from the beyond the initial product they’re also providing value for that now I look at all the board games that you know I’ve played as kids and played as kids and currently play we’ve got quite a few board games at the big check that I go to and these things have been you know made back in the 70s so it was a once-off purchase and we’re just getting a ton of value out of that however you know you can go along and create more value than just the once off purchase by creating the equivalent of what might be an expansion pack the cards for cards gates I’m Jana humanity so I really want to think about that in terms of what you’re selling now in terms sorry in terms of how you’re selling it so you’ve had a look at like the fair value line and how McDonald’s acquires their customers we’ve got that kind of framework of strategy of different products of different price points at different times through that customer journey I also want you to think about what the sales message of communication or the language that you’re using for each of those stages now they should come or be distilled or cascaded down from what you are talking about in terms of how differentiating yourself and how you positioning yourself in the market so all that communication of each of those different stages within that product during come from how you are different and then finally once you’ve got the stages and then you’ve got what the messaging is think about how you can go about acquiring customers now I did speak to that briefly in one of the other calls around paid earned in own media so on the paid and earn side I want you to think about all of the different ways you can pay for attention and also have all of the different ways that you can go and earn attention but not just spend all of your time doing that seeing how you convert can convert that into owned media waste you capture all of that payout all of that money you spend them all that time you spent you’ve capture that into an asset that you can communicate that sales message to all of those prospects and customers as they go through that customer journey and thereby something you know a small price point that they get a small amount of value and then you know the equivalent of the expansion packs as they go on so now in terms of partners and how you can go about creating partnerships the first stage is actually going out and finding as many partners as you can that I related to you but not direct competitors now these are going to be distributors for you so this shouldn’t be a really difficult task that was going out and finding that out about who all those distributors are both online and offline and then once you’ve done that once you’ve found those distributors what is it that they want or what is it that they are motivated by and really finding out that and doing some exploration to what they want and then being able to go out and then provide that for them so going on helping them get whatever they want just before you go out and ask them to promote your game so those four stages are really, really important to go out and find partners that are going to be behind your course and be able to go out and promote what you’re doing so I really hope that helps try it out let me know what happens and thanks your question.