Redefining markets

Last week I wrote that were we starting out today as a web development firm, small, we’d chase down a different path than we did 10 years ago. The new path would be online only with little reliance on local markets. We wouldn’t advertise in the traditional sense, we wouldn’t hang at the local chamber mixers, and we probably wouldn’t pay $6k/mo for office space.

It was an exercise in what we wouldn’t do. Broad strokes. No mention of what we would do. It wasn’t a good post, but it must be an interesting topic - seven emails came in (not including the jabs from a few [local] clients.) A few are considering bouncing to their own thing, a few of them recently have, a few of them are old skool like us. All of them are wondering the same thing:

How do you engage an audience that you can’t define?

I, of course, don’t have the answer. But I do have some thoughts. Just know that I’ll be drifting (veering) in and out of what actually does work for us and what might. Let’s start with what does.

Communities rather than markets

Engaging any audience starts by getting noticed. In a local market, it means building awareness (advertising) within your distribution network. On the interweb, your distribution network is everywhere. So rather than focusing on a set of zipcodes, you focus on a set of interests, communities rather than markets.

Community isn’t geographic. Think medical community. Design community. Web 2.0 community. Open-source community. PHP community. Ruby community. Blogging community. Digg swarm, I mean community.

Communities within industries

The first two might look more like industries than communities. But the mentality should be the same. Specific communities within the medical industry, for instance, have been good to ep throughout our history. We began by targeting the industry, getting to know specific fields, and then working to build awareness within the community.

That awareness has driven leads in two primary ways. 1. Word of mouth referrals from happy clients. 2. Referral traffic from site markers.

New clients have always found us through existing clients. This is especially true within industries. Prospects begin by trolling industry sites or calling colleagues. By the time the lead hits us, they already know a bit about what we do / how we work, but, more importantly, they know that we understand a bit about what they do.

This is a great place to focus. If you make sure you’re working hard for the clients in those industries (communities,) you’ll gain from their networking.

Shared-interest communities

Pushing further into the idea of interest-based community, we get a surprising amount of leads coming out of awareness in the design community. This is where it’s important to have a hell of a designer. Traffic coming in from design galleries accounts for a large percentage of our overall leads from the last 18 months or so.

We don’t dwell on submitting our sites to the galleries or designing a certain way, but we do something very simple that just happens to encourage our inclusion. We build standards-compliant sites. Building awareness in the design community requires that you actively participate in it, not just pretend to.

Participatory communities

The Web 2.0 community is similar. Building Feed Rinse created awareness of ep in the Web 2.0 community. It wasn’t our reason for launching the service, but the side effect of this [modest] awareness was very clear. We got leads.

Blogs are another example. But since I told you I’d start with what I know works, now’s probably a good time to mention that my grip here is going to slip. I’m not a successful blogger. I/we haven’t built much awareness in the blogging community here or with the pulp blog. And, fittingly, we get only a small number of leads from these efforts.

But just like we benefit from having a handle on design and css, we would benefit from having a handle on blogging. What little positive effort we do put into blogging, we see feed us back very directly. A small service firm can drive greater awareness through blogging than they can through local advertising. But only if they do it right. (We need to work on that part.)

The same can be said of social networks…

That was a symbolic pause. I’m embarrassed by my lacking skill as a social networker. Marshall Kirkpatrick, Brian Oberkirch, Cameron Moll, Chris Messina, and Neil Patel are all names I know through blogs, bookmarks, or social networks. Each of them drive awareness of their work through social media. I doubt any of them do much local market advertising. (The role digg, reddit, stumbleupon, etc play in this will have to wait for another wave.)

In this vein, if you’re thinking of starting your own thing today you have an opportunity to avoid something that most service providers never did: the idea that companies with shared interests are competitors. Now they’re called friends, contacts, even drinking buddies. Get linked in (regardless of whether you use linkedin.)

Finally, for now, use Google for your greater good. Learn how the algorithm works. If you’re a web developer not driving qualified leads through search, you have a lot of growth potential. That’s a nice way of telling you you’re missing the boat, and it has clients on it.

Okay, because I know this post has gotten really long, and I already broke the first rule of long post blogging (provide an ordered list,) I’m going to break it down, form of an ordered list:

1. Don’t think of community in terms of local markets. Target a set of interests vs a set of zipcodes.
2. Get to know industries. Your understanding of the community is obvious to those within it.
3. Do good work. Leverage design skills and don’t forget about standards or site markers.
4. Participate in the communities you want to be part of. Enough said.
5. For God’s sake, blog. Do it better than I do.
6. Get to know social media. Digg is your friend (if not mine.) So is reddit and stumblupon and flickr and twitter and mybloglog and others.
7. Link in to the competition. You want as many people as possible to know what you do and how to find you. Competition has been redefined by the interweb just like markets have.
8. Leverage SEO / SEM strategies. Avoid tricks. What you can’t do for free, you can always ppc for.

What did I miss?