marketing in a very specific field; Business intelligence tool for Microsoft Dynamics.

This is interesting.

The obvious choice is PPC, and given the type of product, your best bet is AdWords. You can look into Bing Ads, but given their user-demographics, AdWords is the better option.

If you lack experience in PPC, then your fallback choice should be those already mentioned:

- Socials
- Forums (sig, ad space)
- Blogs (ad space)

Setup pages, groups, communities, accounts. Grow them. Feed them with blog content. Encourage opt-ins with that blog content.

Now your audience is harder to find on the above locations when compared to markets like gaming, fashion, health. You should still work the socials, but don't forget video marketing.

The beauty of video marketing is the ability not merely to go viral within Youtube by taking videos of our cats pretending to be ninjas. The real beauty is this: with a little practice, you can outrank long-standing websites in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can reach people searching to make a relevant purchase.

If you remember EZA marketing a million years ago, a lot of chaps and chapesses would rank in minutes or hours for long-tails - usually desperate buying keywords. EZA is a Dodo Bird. Videos - they're not. You can do exactly the same thing.

I could probably talk all day. Your product sparked my interest. Just some ideas, anyway. Best of luck!

- Tom

Hi Bili,

Without knowing enough about the market as yet, the best advice I can offer is something that I consider standard practice for me whenever entering a new market. Reverse engineer the competition. Too many marketers take action without first putting together a plan. Almost as many marketers, who at least do lay down a plan, do so without the correct approach to research. They apply marketing principles alone to the development of their plan.

Think of it like writing a novel. Do you go to college and major in English, with a heady mixture of novel-writing courses? Or do you also read, read, read? By reading you go beyond the principles laid out by tired and dusty old lecturers. You read novels within the genre that you envision being published yourself. And you read whatever is available. You become glutinous. Your appetite, insatiable. Because this is what it takes to compete. You consciously and often unconsciously take the good elements to use yourself, often writing them down, just like a marketer would - or should - a plan.

In short: isolate your competition, take apart their business, make note of the good elements, use this information to formulate your own suspected good elements, and put all of that information, combined with marketing principles, into a rock solid plan. When I enter a new market, this is what I do. Not to sound overly enthusiastic and remove myself from the "cool kids" clique, but business is war. To win, you need to acquire a taste for blood.

- Tom

Bring a Spoon. You'll Need It.

Tom,

This is off topic, but I love your byline!

How much quicker this IM adventure would play out for many here, if only they ingested everything instead of letting most of it slip through the tines of a fork.

How often have the members here gotten the answer they needed and failed to recognize it?

Maybe the old phrase "read between the lines" should be rephrased to say "read between the tines".

Bili,

Good input from Tom, but I thought of one more potential way to "get the word out".

Since you're already working on a mobile app, why not make it available as a "freebie", with appropriate advertising for your primary product embedded in the app.

I think you'll find much less competition in the Google App Store for your niche, and if it is a good (useful) app for the right market segment, it has a lot of potential as a "loss leader". Any traffic it drives to your main product offer would be very targeted - maybe even pre-sold.

Thanks, Sid! And I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of information consumption. Great phrasing, too. You bring up "read between the tines" and this resonates a great deal with me. A few months back I remember exchanging a few private messages with a nice chap on here, and considerably higher up on the food chain than me. As I was reading his latest message, a portion of a sentence stood out to me, very nearly highlighted in fact, although it was my imagination doing the highlighting. He had no idea I suspect, but he'd just dropped an information bomb, or at least part of it, with only a little thought required from me to connect the dots and therefore form a fuse. Had I missed it, I would have missed out, which certainly highlights for me the importance of your insights.

Bili, not wishing to sound like part of a mutual appreciation society, but Sid's second post above is a cracking one I think. In a different market entirely, I've worked on something similar. In that market, especially, it's the way to go. I'd give it serious consideration.

Cheers - Tom

Hi Bill
I would look up the Surestep portal on the Partner website for Microsoft and you will find some resources there, also try Linkedin for some research you may find some clients just don't spam
RW