Unless marketing a super specialized product that could only appeal to a niche audience, you\u2019ll probably eventually want to move beyond your initial fan base and reach the general public, where a much larger market awaits.<\/p>\n
To cross the gap between that fan base and the public, you\u2019ll need to perform the final step of effective marketing: building a bridge that will allow your product to spread.<\/p>\n
But first, you need to know the nature of the gap you\u2019re trying to span. It boils down to the difference between the two groups in question.<\/p>\n
Your fan base consists of adopters, while the general public is primarily composed of adapters. As a result, you become popular with your fan base for the same reason you\u2019re unpopular with the public: you disrupted the old way of doing things.<\/p>\n
For example, imagine you\u2019re a pioneer of online video streaming back in 2010. Tech mavens are eager to embrace your service \u2013 but the general public wants to cling to their DVDs.<\/p>\n
How do you convince them to let go? How do you build a bridge to them?<\/p>\n
A very powerful answer lies in a phenomenon called the network effect. <\/em>It happens when a product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it. This sets the stage for a positive feedback loop: as more people use the product or service, it becomes more useful; that leads to even more people using it, which makes it even more useful, and so forth and so on.<\/p>\n Consider the case of Slack, an online collaboration platform for coworkers. Initially, it was embraced by a small fan base of people who were willing to learn the ropes of a new program that nobody else was using.<\/p>\n Once they had learned it, they worked on converting their coworkers into Slack users. Why? Because the more coworkers using the platform, the more useful it became.<\/p>\n So the platform started spreading \u2013 and before long, even if someone was a change-resistant adapter, they felt like they had to, well, adapt<\/em> to the new Slack-ified reality of their workplace.<\/p>\n Why? Because they didn\u2019t want to miss out on the conversations and collaborations everyone else was having on the platform.<\/p>\n In sum, network effects can help your product go mainstream, and your initial fan base can lead the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A positive feedback loop happens when a product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":87749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87680,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87679\/revisions\/87680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/87749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}