The technology adoption bell curve provides you with the basic information you need to take advantage of future trends and position yourself for maximum growth. Riding waves at the right time provides you with built in attention opportunities, but those returns will diminish if lightning strikes once.
Rather that work with a single monolithic consumer persona, you can develop consumer cohorts that each have their own behavioral expectations and response triggers. Some of these triggers can also translate consumers from one cohort to another.
Generally speaking, you can capitalize on growth potential by segmenting your communications and product channels across different costs and comfort levels. These costs are measured in more than just economic cost to play. Opportunity cost, social clout, cultural context and availability also play a role, and reducing friction in any of these areas that accelerate your progress in recruiting along the adoption curve.
This strategy works hand in glove with your brand ambassador and product evangelist strategies – each adoption level under the bell curve also has a respective audience and promotional weight.
Innovators (2.5%)
As individuals who are eager to use the latest and greatest technology, they are willing to pay the least up front but often operate in circles of trend setters and speculative investors. This group is small, but attracts individuals who are less risk averse and more progressive in terms of solving problems, disrupting the status quo and living on the edge.
Early Adopters (13.5%)
As individuals who affirm the risk of innovators, the first fans of the first fans have big clout with the enthusiastic innovators who need to see service structures and use case demonstrations in place – they can’t always visualize how important a product or service is until they see innovators put it into context. Once they have the context, however, this cohort is willing to put their social reputation behind new products that have treated the innovators well. Probably the most important group in terms of parabolic growth. This group drives value for your enterprise at scale.
Early Majority (34%)
As individuals who prefer and represent the wisdom of crowds, this group provides much of the financial stability and brand evangelism that will help establish your position and duration in the market. This group is not interested in risk, but are willing to pay more at the retail level for a reliable product or experience.
Late Majority (34%)
The risk averse individuals are important to watch because they are first markers of the vertical success of an endeavor. Their presence indicates that a solution has reached near saturation and another innovation round or expansion round should begin – because this retail cycle is nearly over. You will need something new soon!
Laggards (16%)
This groups includes naysayers and other socially resistant or ultraconservative individuals who have been forced to capitulate due to the new solution being irresistible or inescapable, prior solutions no longer being available, or other forms of forced obsolescence. They can provide some value as conversion stories from long-standing hold-outs – they may find themselves in the late or even early majority during your next innovation or product cycle.
Is their a balanced approach to pay to play for growth?
It is important to remember that if cost is not a factor, anyone can get access to pretty much any amount of inbound traffic they want. The quality may be low, their interests irrelevant, the conversions terrible, but the visitor numbers will be there. Blind numbers don’t tell a story about your enterprise – they indicate your ability to manipulate traffic, but say nothing about whether that traffic goes in a helpful direction.
This is why key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be crafted thoughtfully and in alignment with the broader goals, expectations and productive capabilities of the enterprise. Driving too much traffic in or bringing in more valid business than you can handle means leaving a lot of potential income and wasted promotional expenses on the table. The balanced way to buy promotional traffic or keyword traffic is to take a measured approach and stick to the strategic limits you have set. You may still leave potential income or sales on the table, but at least you will know what constraints and expectations were being served by that attempt and strategic process improvements are possible.
How can I narrow my niche and maximize my conversion rates?
By localizing and being strategic about your core audience and targeting your advertising campaigns with the quality of type of attention you need to tie into your on-ramps and buy-in strategies, it is possible to generate a sales funnel that has a better conversion to cost ratio. It may look like a reduction in volume at first, but as conversion improve you can scale up your dominance in a particular niche and make up the difference.
Then, once you’ve mastered a niche you can branch that niche strategy out into tweaked version of the same niche – change one attribute or two – look for closely tied verticals to spread into. You don’t want your tweaked version to be so close as to cannibalize your original efforts, but you want to be able to make as much out of the data you’ve obtained through establishing your first niche to expand into others.
What strategies can I employ to piggyback on concentrated traffic streams?
The challenge when dealing with established traffic streams is diverting attention while not disturbing momentum. Sometimes you can divide attention evenly – provide options to continue that seem like part of the flow, but actually engage different outcomes. Sometimes this may mean introducing a new alternative as an equivalent to the one that gathered the initial momentum, but people also don’t like to feel like they were tricked into buying in to something that is too different from what they expected. Playing up the relationship between what a person expected and what alternative is being offered makes the cross-promotion or up-sell more appealing.
How can I ride trends effectively?
Working through hashtags that follow typically formatted standards and familiar trend titles can bring you traffic from related ideas. This relationship can be symbiotic – playing off a given meme in a clever usage that is unexpected, ironic – playing off a given meme in a way that is funny or exaggerated, satirical – playing off a given meme in a way that pokes fun at the ubiquity or age of a given trend, here we go again, or sardonic – driving a darker or edgier version of a meme to drive controversy or appeal to those who normally would not follow trends, but feel more comfortable participating in a campaign that feel countercultural or antiestablishment.
How you ride a given trending hashtag or topic really depends on your audience – which of the adoption levels you are trying to engage – and the age and familiarity of the trend you wish to follow. Has it become memeworthy? It is past its freshness date? Has it been overplayed? Has it been damaged by scandal, notoriety or hypocrisy in the court of public opinion? Can it be reclaimed, recycled or upcycled?
These are just general ideas connected to the topic of growth, traffic and trend engagement. If you’d like us to help you work through the landscape of your particular industry or for a particular campaign – perhaps you need help building or riding a social movement – set up a discovery call with us today so that we can get to know your fundamentals and how you envision the growth of your enterprise.