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Great content builds trust over time.
You dole out a ton of information before asking people to buy. And who doesn’t love a free lunch?
Splendid, weighty content keeps you top-of-mind of prospective customers. Now because content marketing works, you want to spend more.
Problem is, by now everyone knows content marketing and is going full throttle on it.
Consider a stack of competitors descending on your prospect. They pump in the best resources to churn out kick-ass content.
Suddenly there is nothing special about your proposition. How do you stand out?
More content? Easily outnumbered. Better stuff? Out-done in a snap.
More spending? ROIs could deep dive. A risk you can’t take.
Now according to a 2015 IBM Digital Experience Survey, 56% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates.
Content marketing pros may go by the gut to build up valuable and even personalized content.
But with countless businesses reinventing themselves vigorously for a share of eyeballs, it could be a shot in the dark.
Clearly, linear content marketing thinking is not going to work.
One thing can make your consumer slam the brakes, look out and drool: an extraordinary mix of thought, ingenuousness, and action.
Hello ‘MicroProducts’: The secret sauce to lure serious attention, eyeballs, and traffic to your website
‘MicroProducts’ are big, well-planned, and elaborate (and ambitious) projects made to add value to a client’s life.
They are born from the same seed as content marketing and are content-based by DNA. But that’s where the similarity ends.
‘MicroProducts’ are conceived exactly at a client's pain point.
They can grow to be as large as a piece of software, a unique product idea, a tool – anything that attempts to ease the client's pain by delivering something enormously useful; something of real and measurable value.
In effect, ‘MicroProducts’:
- Are built to ease a specific pain point
- Are well-planned and detailed
- Are aimed to deliver real, inherent, and enduring value
A great way to conceive a ‘MicroProduct’ is to address something critical that has not been identified or resolved before.
It could take a precious amount of time, research, expertise, and dedication to build one. Think after-hours and weekends.
The good thing, though, is that hard work can create a windfall of rewards, both to the creator and the recipient.
Consider the case of unsplash.com.
Rewind to a time when Crew, a creative freelancing platform, was struggling to survive. No money, no customers.
Distraught at the photographs they found on the web while building their website, they started posting awesome photos online and giving them away for free on unsplash.com.
Soon, people grappling with similar problems flocked to their websites.
“We not only experienced the immediate benefits of creating value but also a much bigger shift in how marketing needs to be done today in order to be heard.” - Mikael Cho, Founder of Crew & Creator of Unsplash.
Today, unsplash.com offers 10 free (do whatever you want) hi-res photos every ten days and snags 5 million uniques.
The founders have now sold Crew and are only focussing on unplash.com.
Oftentimes, the rewards of a ‘MicroProduct’ go beyond measure
For instance, the rise of StartupStash.com into the #1 upvoted product on Product Hunt is stunning.
It was born as a simple excel sheet format of a whopping 50 categories and corresponding resources that could help makers build startups with ease.
It is now a curated directory packed with useful resources and tools you need to build a startup.
The project addresses such a massive pain point that a mere feature on 2 sites early on helped it bag 600 e-mail subscribers.
The ‘MicroProduct’ clocked a mind-boggling 350+ visitors per minute at one point in time. It later recorded 1573 upvotes, making it the most upvoted product of all time on Product Hunt.
When you create value for an audience, they listen and even participate (like the upvotes above). That is a competitive advantage that’s tough to match.
Let’s take the example of CoSchedule - an easy-to-use master calendar for content marketing and social scheduling.
It helps plan and schedule blog posts, social media posts, and lots more content.
A savvy idea that’s not too easy to beat. But intuitive platforms like Trello, Buffer, and Hootsuite have been quick to catch the trend.
How can CoSchedule stand apart?
‘MicroProducts’ to the rescue: Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule.
They now share a free tool that rates the quality of your post title and gives ideas on how to improve it for the better.
This magic potion offers massive value to bloggers desperate for click throughs on their content pieces – that too, in seconds.
Plus it stacks up brownie points for CoSchedule as the biggie in content marketing.
We’re massive followers of the ‘MicroProduct’ idea and have backed it up with our own home-grown turn-around success story.
Our ‘MicroProduct’ started off as a simple free resource and made us $200,000. Got you to sit up?
Told you - ‘MicroProducts’ is a ridiculously awesome idea.
We wanted to attract more US-based startup clients for our digital marketing. Could we build something that could drive leads to our Consulting service?
We knew from experience that finding the first few customers was a roadblock for business.
Founders were ready to give an arm and limb to promote their start-up. We wanted to give them a simpler alternative.
We started putting together a list of places they could be featured on and launched Promotehour.com.
It was a list of 130+ startup communities where founders could promote their newly launched startups and acquire early adopters.
Within a fortnight, we got featured on ProductHunt, driving hundreds of daily visitors to our site.
They all used and shared us big time.
Over 100k founders today and 4k+ new founders every month use the list. But how did we swing the $200,000 part?
With Promotehour, we saw an opportunity to help founders by providing a service that would help them in getting listed on sites.
We tapped it by offering a paid submission plan at $49.
At a time when PR agencies cost a fortune, we introduced on-demand PR campaigns to get our clients' much-needed coverage in tech media outlets.
With 1000+ startups signing up, we clocked revenue of $200,000+ in our first 2 years.
Almost all customers came from our free resource which still sits on our homepage.
We didn't raise any funding. Marketing was taken care of by the free resource. And we’ve been profitable from day one.
Incredible?
A case of fortune favoring the brave, we believe.
No doubt, ‘MicroProducts’ is a gutsy investment.
That’s why goodies from ‘MicroProducts’ just don’t seem to end.
- They have a far longer shelf-life than a regular blog post.
- They inspire ideas for how we can do things differently across the company.
- They attract not just anyone, but specifically those audiences who align with your belief in creating value as the best form of marketing.
At times, these are also the people you want on our team.
In fact, Unsplash.com outgrew its purpose as a ‘MicroProduct’ to become the #1 referral source to its parent Crew. Win-win.
While all this sounds swell, the real action kicks off on-ground.
How do YOU crack a ‘MicroProduct’ for your firm?
Start by identifying what kind of ‘MicroProduct’ you want to create. Whatever you do, make it epic and make it insanely useful.
'MicroProduct' Type #1: Build a Curated Resource for crazy busy gen.
You do the hard work and give people access to a group of vital resources. They’ll love you for it.
The stuff we pulled off at Promotehour made us learn to help first and sell later. Our main purpose was to build something simple, yet useful and offer it for free.
It became a rage and we found a way to monetize it later on. StartupStash above is built on similar lines.
It saves a ton of time, and rocks as a go-to resource.
‘MicroProduct’ Type #2: Build a calculator. A simple project that packs an incredible punch.
With the dynamics of modern business-changing by the minute, a spiffy project like howmuchtomakeanapp.com could answer a burning problem for your prospect.
It works as a handy app cost calculator to let people get an idea of how much their app could cost – in less than a minute.
Churned out by the same guys at Crew, this ‘MicroProduct’ is another winner for them.
‘MicroProduct’ Type #3: Get on with a Free App. Could be a great problem-solver.
To get an app on the floor, start by looking around for a niggling problem that could be lying unaddressed.
If answered, it could deliver great efficiencies for a hassled community.
We realized that while startups wanted media attention, they struggled to put a professional press kit together.
We kicked off Instakit.co to help create a professional press kit online the easy-peasy way.
It slashes their time and effort and helps them multiply their reach in a jiffy.
‘MicroProduct’ Type #4: Online courseware. The more unique and in-depth it is, the more value it creates.
The short automated e-mail drill is done and over with.
People are looking for meaningful, unique, and comprehensive courses that will make a real difference.
You could go for a detailed course spanning over 10-12 weeks or even 6 months, depending on the dope you may want to share.
Just make sure it's comprehensive, useful, and enriching.
‘MicroProduct’ Type #5: Create a Browser Extension. Rid people of web annoyances.
No auto-play videos annoy the heck out of you or do a pop-up irritate you more? Browser extensions or browser add-ons help banish them for good.
They do a world of other exciting things – like integrating with other services you use, adding extra features to your browser, or modifying websites as they appear.
In short, by extending the functionality of a web browser, they go a long way in personalizing the web-browsing experience.
‘MicroProduct’ Type #6: Build a Bot. Get artificial intelligence to work for you.
Bots are the coolest things walking around the web space right now. People can visually build, train and deploy bots to do just about anything.
Touted as a major disruption in the way the web works, bots are the new way to get work done quickly and efficiently.
They are simple, intuitive, and engaging.
When AI Chatbot Mitsuku lifted the Loebner Prize, an annual AI competition, for the second time last year, she proved that AI bots were here to capture people’s imagination.
‘MicroProduct’ Type #7: Free Weekly Resource. One-shot every week.
A whole lot of start-ups out there are struggling to make a dent.
One free resource from your end every week can give them the weaponry and the skill they need to do so.
Take Creative Market - a platform for handcrafted, “mouse-made design content” from independent creatives around the world.
To make beautiful design simple and accessible to everyone, they offer a tempting line-up of Free Weekly Goods. Gorgeous, useful, on-trend.
Whether your ‘MicroProduct’ is a weekly one or a one-time, it’s worth remembering that consistency is key.
This repeated usefulness is what makes a ‘MicroProduct’ exceptional. People keep coming back even though you’re not putting in extra work. That’s a fabulous thing.
To skyrocket the way your company is growing, creating remarkable value is a must-do, and more importantly, a must-repeat.
For budding entrepreneurs, ‘MicroProducts’ is a great way to start something small and leverage it once people find it useful.
No external funding is needed. Totally self-inspired.
Repeated, resolute, and targeted ‘MicroProducts’ are the only strokes you can use to dazzle your audience and get them coming back to you.
Can’t wait to build your own? We’ve been there and have a bunch of tricks to help you make it happen.
We’re leaving you with a pin-up that packs in all that we’ve been saying.
