TRACTION
“Traction is basically quantitative evidence of customer demand.” Traction is a sign that your company is taking off.
I define traction as proof that your marketing efforts are paying off. Stagnation will bury a small company. Unless you can show measurable, positive results from your marketing, your business may be in a marketing stagnation downturn. Months of marketing effort, a lot of hard work, and using several marketing venues without any results, does not equate to traction. Busy work does not mean you are gaining traction.
The marketing process is one of continuous testing. If you are using social media as a marketing venue, a large number of “hits” on your site does not mean anything unless a percentage of those hits turn into customers.
Traction has to have a goal; it could be in the form of new customers or an increased bottom line. It has to be tied to a time line.
In their book, Traction, Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, list 19 traction channels. The channels are: Targeting Blogs, Publicity, Unconventional PR, Search Engine Marketing, Social and Display ads, offline ads, Search Engine Optimization, E-mail marketing, Engineering as Marketing, Business Development, Sales, Affiliate Programs, Existing Platforms, Trade Shows, Offline Events, Speaking Engagements and Community Building.
Within each of these channels there are multiple ways of telling your story. They won’t all work, but the testing in each of these channels is the key to determination of its value.
I want to share a personal example of getting Publicity. There are many online places where you can post a news release about your business; some are free, others will charge you a fee. There is no guarantee of success in either case. They submit your press release and you wait and hope that someone will pick up your story. In our case, we determined what target customers read and then went after that publication. It took a lot of outreach to get an introduction to an editor and, even with the introduction, it took almost a month of personal follow ups to get a reporter assigned to do a story.
Perseverance finally paid off and as a result of the article other publications called to write an article and customers started calling. We gained credibility and if helped us to launch a multi-million dollar business.
How many of these 19 channels have you used and why did you pick them and what was the result of your testing?
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