Leverage Your Marketing Efforts for Maximum Impact for your New Product or Invention

In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he tells a story of a man who stopped digging for gold and sold his mine to a junk dealer. Soon after, the junk dealer made an enormous discovery. Three feet past where the digging had stopped by the previous owner, he unearthed the world’s largest vein of gold. Great for him, not so great for the previous owner.

It makes me wonder how many people are three feet short of getting their product or million dollar idea off the ground.

For many people that I have met, the problem is marketing. Where to start, what to do, the question of financial resources, and so on. And no matter what scale your business marketing budget revolves in, whether small or large, you have to look at the most effective methods of marketing and this often entails the effective use of leverage.

Leverage is when you get maximum results for minimal effort. In other words, if you only had one opportunity to market your product, what could you do that would give you the greatest exposure and opportunity for your product with the least amount of effort.

Leverage is the secret of all great businesses and below is my list of high leverage activities that you can incorporate into your marketing efforts:

1. Get your product on one of the shopping channels (QVC or HSN) - one exposure here is the equivalent of having a sales force of hundreds pounding the pavement for your product.
2. Participate in a trade show - hundreds of buyers attend industry tradeshows - having a booth in one of these gains great exposure for your products.
3. Find a qualified manufacturer’s representative to pitch your product to the major stores. Leveraging the work of others gives you the time you need to focus on things within your strength.
4. Create a viral word of mouth video campaign using the internet. Many videos on Youtube that have gotten millions of hits are produced with nothing more than a consumer video camera. Creativity and humor are just a few keys to going viral, so place your creative inventive mind to work for you in the area of video ideas and you’ll be surprised what you can come up with.
5. License your product or idea - quite often licensing provides the product creator with phenomenal leverage. Yes, you’re missing out on profit, but you’re also not doing the day to day work and marketing of your product. The key to going the licensing route is to of course have great ideas, but also to have many of them working for you. If you’re focusing on day to day business activities you won’t have as much time for idea creation and thus the power of licensing when it comes to leverage.

February 12th, 2008