Today I spent a few hours in a meeting where something simple took a lot longer than expected. Yeah I know, that’s never happened to you….right? One of the questions we were trying to determine was the target audience. When you know exactly who you are speaking to, the messaging is a lot easier.

I recall the early days of Soonr when we were building our website and we just described the functionality. We were product oriented and not as customer oriented. Later, we started to try to attract a younger mobile consumer as they seemed to be buying all the cool new phones that we worked well on. Later, we discovered that they did not spend much money on web services! Seems kinda obvious in hindsight, but at the time it was hard to tell.

As we gained experience and realized that a remote access service really appeals to the mobile professional, we decided to change the look and feel to appeal to a business audience. The site was very clean, used “serious” tones, and the graphics were all of business people getting things done while away from the office. It didn’t talk so much about product anymore, but about benefits and services.

So about a month ago we found out that our website was going to be featured in a new book called “Web Marketing for Dummies” as an example of a site with a clear business focus. Here’s a quick picture of page 71 of the book where our web homepage appears at the top.

The other page included for contrast is Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream! That’s about as consumer focused as you can get.

So it looks like all our planning, redesigning, and messaging paid off. We hit exactly the target market we were after! It’s always nice to get recognized for your efforts and we now have that recognition in the form of a book about Web Marketing. Very cool.

You can get the book Web Marketing for Dummies at Amazon.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Events, Mobile Markets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.