Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (37 page)

Reddit

Another site where some entrepreneurs I’ve worked with have gotten good traction is Reddit, specifically a Q&A forum called AMA (Ask Me Anything). Reddit is a social media site where communities center around topics rather than individual brands. Because of this distinction, it’s not the best place for self-promotion, because the site limits the number of links you can submit from any one source. Individuals submit links, and community members vote the links up or down. The popularity of links determines their placements on the site, with the most popular links making it to the front page, where they receive the most visibility.

An AMA is essentially an opportunity to schedule an interview with members of your community. Of course, your fans have access to you through Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, but with this format you’re basically giving your audience a chunk of your undivided time, which in this busy day and age is quite a novelty. When I’ve done Reddits, I’ve found that people love asking me questions and hearing my answers, and I love hearing what they have to say, too. Again, this is not the place to sell. But if you launch an intelligent conversation and become an integral part of communities that revolve around topics related to your brand, you can gain a lot of awareness.

Google+ Hangouts

Hangouts are a lot like video versions of Reddit AMA’s. Users can gather for group chats and videoconferences, which can then sync to other sites for broader dissemination. For example, when I did a hangout, I synced it with my Twitter and Facebook
accounts so that anyone there could watch the hangout live even if they weren’t on Google+. In addition, those Twitter and Facebook viewers could send in their own questions, which I then answered live.

WHY I LOVE SOCIAL MEDIA

The thing I love best about the social media isn’t so much what they allow me to give in the form of information, but what they allow me to receive. Hearing from my customers affirms my faith in humanity. I’m amazed by the diversity of the people who follow me on social media. They are all different ages, genders, and backgrounds—it’s fun getting to know them and hearing about their lives. Talking to them proves to me that overall people are really good and caring. From a business perspective, it’s great to hear my customers’ opinions and concerns in real time. For example, when I’m creating new products, I can ask fans about what color choices they’d prefer or what design details would be most useful. I can ask people how they felt about a deal I did or didn’t make on the last
Shark Tank
episode. Their comments and responses to my questions are always entertaining, inspiring, and downright hilarious. Plus, they help me stay aware of what is important to people and what is most on their minds.

While the social media serve my business well by allowing me to market to my audience, they also serve me personally by helping me feel more connected to my fans and reassuring me that I’m giving them what they want and need. That’s the secret to successful social media marketing. Yes, it’s a great marketing tool, but it only works if your primary aim is to build community and engage with people.
Engaging
does not mean posting or tweeting links to your webpage or e-commerce site every six minutes. Engaging means really being interested in hearing what your consumers have to say. It means joining communities and
contributing to them. It means sharing other people’s content when you think your audience would enjoy it as much as you did, even if that means sharing the spotlight. It means liking or favoriting when they tweet or post something you like. It’s a lot more about give and take, and asking and listening, than it is about pushing and promoting.

One person who has gotten a lot of press for his personal, seamless social media marketing is Justin Timberlake. In particular, he seems to have mastered the art of making his fans feel like he’s speaking directly in his own voice, not hiding behind a PR firm. If you spend enough time on his Facebook page, and especially his Twitter feed, where he intersperses album promos with birthday greetings to his friends, asides to fellow performers, and direct responses to fans, you come away feeling that you know him.

While there are plenty of direct sales pitches, there are far more questions, teasers, photographs, and behind-the-scenes revelations. To help promote his first studio release in seven years, he hosted a scavenger hunt, hiding signed copies of a vinyl version of his new album in locations across the country. Clues to the locations were posted as Instagram photos.
People who raced to the locations and found the albums had to show record label reps the hashtag that accompanied the Twitter clue to prove they weren’t just lucky passersby. By all accounts, his strategic use of social media was one of the most successful album marketing campaigns in recent history, resulting in first-week sales of almost a million copies, a rare number in today’s fractured music industry.

Yet there are lots of talented pop stars out there who tweet and post and “engage,” but who don’t see those kinds of sales upon their album’s release. Of course, none of Timberlake’s efforts would amount to anything if he weren’t also producing a
superb product.
But what really made the difference, according to executives in music and marketing industries, was his tireless and genuine efforts to connect with his fans.

You can’t just launch a promotion like a contest, sweepstakes, or giveaway on your social media sites—there is a whole body of law in this area, so the sites generally have extremely strict rules about what you can do and how it needs to be set up. You need to be aware of these regulations. I strongly advise you to discuss your plans with an attorney who specializes in social media before attempting to run any kind of game, sweepstakes, promotion, or contest on a social media site. It would be terrible for you to have to take your page or account down because you did something wrong.

You may not be Justin Timberlake, but there is no reason why inventors and entrepreneurs with fabulous products to sell can’t model some of their marketing efforts after his to gain a loyal following and enhanced brand awareness.

OTHER MARKETING OPTIONS

ONLINE FORUMS
Long before Reddit, there were online forums, and many still exist and are going strong. They tend to appeal to niche audiences. Gaming is a highly popular topic for online forums, but they exist for all kinds of interests, from parenting to vegetarianism. The Drop Stop “Boyz” discovered that there are online
forums for every make of car, with enormous followings. Once they started interacting with the community—sharing ideas, trading stories, offering advice, but never selling—eventually members started finding out about their product and asked for more information. All that community building generally puts people in a positive, supportive frame of mind, and once one member tried the Drop Stop and endorsed it, the rest flocked to try it themselves.

BUYSELLADS.COM
BuySellAds.com
allows you to pay very little for various social media–related boosts, like getting ad placement on an influential blog or paying people with large Twitter followings to tweet for you.

CELEBRITIES
It’s a long shot, but getting your product into the right celebrity hands can sometimes do amazing things for your brand. One magazine photograph of a celebrity using your product, and your website may see a tremendous boost in traffic. Remember, the rule for matching celebrity to product holds true here as it does in infomercials: it has to make sense. A better strategy than spending a lot of time and money courting celebrities is to make sure that your individual customers love it, and encourage them to share their positive experiences with others, both in person and through social media.

Celebrities find out about many products the same way everyone else does—they see them on TV, they bump into a friend who uses them, they read their cousin’s status update about them. That’s when they decide they want those products for themselves. Kelly Preston told me that her husband John Travolta was watching QVC one day when we were both on. I came on to sell my weekender bag, and next thing she knew, he wanted three. I was psyched. I like John Travolta, and he’s a pilot! As far as I
know, no one has photographed him using the bags, but you have to think he spends a lot of time around other people who travel frequently. All it would take is one compliment on the bag to start a conversation around it, which might then lead to another sale.

Do the heavy lifting first—make a quality product—and as word of mouth builds, you’ll have a better chance of getting it into celebrity hands. For the record, on the occasion when you can get a celebrity endorsement, it can have a big impact. One day my company got a call from an editor at O magazine telling us that they wanted to see my Silver Safekeeper in the letter “o.” A couple of weeks later, they requested thirty more boxes in a variety of letters. They were going to be given away as party favors for a client in California.

Later we found out that the party was at Oprah’s house! It turned out that Gayle King had seen the Silver Safekeeper and showed it to Oprah, and they had decided it would be a perfect party favor. We were flattered, honored, and grateful, and even more so when they featured it as one of Oprah’s “Favorite Things” in the magazine. Getting a thumbs-up from Oprah resulted in the single largest boost in sales of this product.

SOCIAL MARKETING COMPLEMENTS TRADITIONAL MARKETING

With so much of this chapter devoted to emphasizing the benefits of social media, you might think that no one need ever invest in traditional marketing avenues like television, print, or radio anymore. Not at all. Traditional marketing works, and works really well. However, if your funds are limited, it doesn’t make sense to spend a fortune when you can reach your consumers for free, or at least for significantly less than you’d pay for a print ad or infomercial.

Social media marketing will cost you far less than any traditional
marketing platforms possibly could, and you could potentially reach more people. If you do opt to pay for some traditional marketing, and you want to make the most of your investment, it is imperative that you figure out ways to integrate social media into it. Now that the vast majority of people turn to the Internet and their electronic devices for their news and entertainment, social media marketing must be a main focus of your marketing strategy.

You have to make sure that your marketing reaches your consumers whether they’re online or off. Ideally, your online marketing will often highlight events surrounding your brand and other ways in which consumers can interact with your product out in the real world, and your traditional marketing will reinforce your online presence and remind consumers to look for you when they are there, too. For example, if you print postcards to hand out at trade shows, street festivals, or sales events, make sure that your website is clearly listed, and that you include icons indicating your presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and any other social media platforms you use. Many businesses use testimonials taken from their social media sites when writing ads or marketing copy.

MARKETING OPENS DOORS

The Internet is your friend. If you’re having trouble breaking down doors and getting into retail venues, concentrate on boosting your online networks and fans, so that buyers will take you seriously. Build a fantastic website. Create a Facebook page, and start posting lots of interesting, colorful updates. Tweet to build followers and create a community around your product or brand. Try initiating a Groupon offer, if appropriate. Sell on Etsy. Do whatever it takes to build traction and hype. Can you get your
product into the right celebrity’s hands? Can you get a local television personality to interview you or feature your product on a show? Use all the resources and all the creativity you have to get your product in the public eye.

Get the word-of-mouth machine cranking, so that your product is talked about and seen as widely as possible. Create a perfect storm. Hit every marketing platform as hard and fast as possible. I’ve blitzed the market with almost every product I’ve introduced. This strategy has worked for me, and I’ve seen it work for many others, too. No matter what your product, if you can corner the market before someone else, even if the competition eventually tries to knock you off, it’s your product’s name that will be on everyone’s minds. And once you’ve got brand recognition and loyalty, you’ll have almost everything you need for success, because buyers don’t like to turn their backs on products that are already selling well.

MARKETING TO-DO LIST:

Set up a Facebook page.