So you’ve been busy building your business. You’ve concentrated on marketing. You’ve gotten out there and posted to Facebook and Twitter. You’ve posted your story on all your sales pages. You’ve created your blog. You’ve even written articles and posted them all over the web. You’ve hung around forums and posted ’till you were told to stop. You’ve been building your brand like gangbusters.
But have you forgotten something?
The biggest brand success factor isn’t marketing. It’s delivering on your promises. It’s delivering a quality product to your customers.
And for those of us creating learning content that means your biggest success factor is product creation. You see it’s in product design and creation that most of your quality is going to be built in — or left out.
In the short term, people listen to your branding efforts. Your marketing is a key factor in developing their opinion of your quality. They listen to your promises — both stated and implied — and then make a decision. Your marketing will convince people that you do know what you are doing. And that you will deliver a quality product.
But in the long term, they will judge you by how well you actually deliver on those promises. They judge you by the quality of your products. By the quality of your services. And by the quality of the relationship they develop with you. And in the internet marketing business developing a long term relationship with your customers is a key to success. That’s why list building is so important.
And when creating courses and eBooks and other information products the biggest influence on your quality is how you design and develop your products.
Quality in a learning content product is measured on three levels.
The first is content. But your customers — your target audience — are taking your course precisely because they don’t know the content. They are there to learn the content. So their judgment of the quality of that content is different. It isn’t based on how well you know your subject.
Instead your customers will judge your content based on how well it meets their needs and expectations. Did you design the product to solve a specific problem they are having? Did you design your product around their motivations? That’s how they will judge your content.
The second thing they will judge you on is organization. Do you seem to understand the topic well enough to present it so they understand? Do you go off into odd regions? Do you make logical sense in your presentation?
Finally they will judge you based on delivery. Does it look professional? How is your spelling? How is your grammar? Do you seem to be friendly and easy to speak to?
But it’s not that simple. You see the way you deliver quality content involves closely identifying and targeting your customer. And that same target customer you defined in the product design and creation process will be used for all your contacts with your customers. Including making your marketing target your desired customer. So your short term influence ultimately also depends on the quality of your product design process.
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