Marketing Mishap!

I recently made a basic error. I thought of a new training programme that would be wonderful for businesses. It’s “Positivity Training” – eg Positivity Telesales and so on. I’m a very upbeat sort of person (annoyingly so, my husband thinks sometimes!) and as I already offer ‘interpersonal skills training’ for businesses, this seemed a natural progression. I could help other companies have very positive staff and put a spring in their step at work!

So….I set about creating a nice little icon design representing Positivity (a fancy sort of cross really) and crafted out a whole Positivity Training spiel. I expect I spent getting on for a week excitedly creating the wording, the marketing material layouts, a webpage, costings and so on.

Then…and only then….did I take on some advice from an SEO expert pal of mine, Marc P Summers (Monkeydesignhouse.com). Check out the Google Adwords site, he said, and just find out how many people are looking for Positivity Training and the related words. Oh ok, said I, tapping merrily away on my computer – only to find out that NO-ONE is looking for this. Not a soul. It’s simply not on companies’ radars!

I had spent a week of my busy business’ time, wasting it on creating a ‘product’ that no-one wants. Actually it gets worse. When you do put Positivity or Positive or Positive Results and similar such words into Google Adwords – it shows that the only people doing so are those interested in finding out about just two topics: Pregnancy or Aids.

Oh. Smack on the head, Jane. I had put everything you-know-what about face. Instead of starting with a marvellous new product and trying to persuade an unwilling world to love it – I should have started the other way round, ie What are the public looking for? What can I offer that fills a need? What’s the existing problem for which I can offer a solution? Durr.

It was back to the drawing board with the realisation that companies are indeed looking for customer service training and/or interpersonal skills training (both of which I can and do offer)….and so, into the ‘bin’ went my nice little Positivity icon, never to see the light of day!

Note to self: a (so-called) bright idea is not enough – and there’s no substitute for a bit of research to see what your customers actually want!