I attended a ‘Breakfast Briefing’ today, put on by the Tech Council of NWPA; the speaker being Mark James, founder of ED Solutions, Inc. Basically, Mark is paid for website consulting, usually to city governments and economic development agencies. Talk about a target market that won’t be going away anytime soon!
One of the things Mark talked about was the emergence of what is called the Prospect Funnel, which reminded me of a presentation I put on just recently where I termed a certain business approach as the Product-Prospect Funnel.
Here is a diagram I used in the Powerpoint for my presentation:
What it means is this:
- Create Products to fill a need in a market
- Use niche marketing techniques to find customers for those products
- Fill the pipeline with the increased customer base
- Realize an increased revenue from the product, and any additional advanced services that you can offer them.
It isn’t a full-proof technique and does lend itself to certain industries like software and publishing, but it might spur a way of thinking for your own business idea.
Mark James, the presenter I watched this morning, likened his own prospect funnel to a website. You funnel all the traffic you can to your site so that when they finally get to the checkout process (or whatever your site is designed for), they are very well qualified leads.
In terms of an ecommerce site, it should be so simple to navigate that a three year old could do it. With some sort of a regional development site, like the City of Boston’s website, you would need to provide everything from pictures to history to landmarks and tourist attractions, because you want a user to move there.
I don’t know about you, but designing a website that sells an ebook would be a hell of a lot easier than building a site that qualifies a person to move to a new area!
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