It’s easy to talk about clever ways to reach new customers. Making it happen is hard to do. Doing it cheaply is even harder.

One way is to create a simple marketing application and a small website to advertise it.

By using off the shelf technology, coupled with skilled, custom development, organizations can create a mobile application to reach customers without a lot of risk or expense. We’ll discuss how great off the shelf software and a talented team can combine to build quick interactive applications and websites to market them.

Step 1: Pick a Software Partner

Putting together a great team of developers is tough to do. Its easier to outsource this if you are not a technology company, but picking the right provider is important. Software development projects need capable, savvy software people to work closely with an organizations internal team. I believe it is critical that the marketing folks can interact directly with the developers.

Using the Joel Test

There is a great test by Joel Spolsky which organizations that are evaluating technology should ask a vendor or development contractor before signing on the dotted line:

The Joel Test
(The higher the Joel score the better the company)

The simple test is a set of 12 questions which describe “best development practices”. If the vendor scores below 10, you should have serious concerns.
Ask the company if they have processes in place to promote quality software development. We prefer a development process known as Agile Software Development.

Scrum and Agile Software Development

Everything you ever wanted to know about Agile Software Development is available at Wikipedia. I’m not going to go into it here, but if you haven’t heard of it you need to go there and read it. From a 10,000 foot level, it is a proven way to increase your return on investment for the development of your software.

A process which is often used with Agile Development is called SCRUM. Scrum development uses an iterative approach to implementing great ideas. Start with small goals, set a time limit, and then sprint towards the finish line. At the end of the allotted time period, take note of how successful the team was. By breaking down your huge task into small bite sized increments, your team can more easily focus creative energy into actual products.

Step 2: Decide on a Quick Project

Come up with an application which can be accomplished in three days of work. Brainstorm with your marketing team and include a technology member to help guide them towards a “doable” project. Keep your expectations reasonable, but push your team.

The application should meet your business needs.

Ask questions. Think of answers and what the implications are.

• Who Are you Trying To Reach – Are you trying to reach new customers or inform existing customers about new services?
• Revenue – Are you planning to sell the application or give it away for free and hope to gain through other indirect means?

Make a decision and then put a trusted developer on it. This can be an outsourced developer’s time or an internal resource if available. Give the person a deadline and say “just do the best you can do”. You would be surprised at what a talented teammate can accomplish with some inspiration and attention in a relatively short amount of time.

Iterative Development

Next you want to play with the application. Give it to your internal team and let them play with it. Get them to give feedback, but be kind as the prototype was created in a short amount of time. Use some of that feedback to either build on the application or change it. Repeat this process with short development cycles.

In large organizations, these kinds of exercises can help give “concreteness” to great ideas. But remember to keep the costs low and set limits on meetings and brain storming sessions.

Step 3: Create a Web Presence

If you think your application is ready to reach a larger audience, you should start by building a small marketing website to launch the application. It is that anyone be able to manage the content of the site. Enter the dreaded acronym “CMS”.

There are tons of content management systems available on the market. Some are very expensive, customized solutions used in large organizations. Some are very small, limited functionality products available at very low cost or no cost to the public. For our purposes here, we will describe one product which serves most needs quite well. It’s very easy to use, easy to setup, and best of all it’s free.

Wordpress

This software package is known best for its powerful blogging capabilities and slick administrator interface. It’s open source software and is available at no cost. They even have a hosted version of the software that is also free. You can go to their site, sign up, and in minutes have your own blog on their servers.

Wordpress.org

Plugins and a Social Network

With hundreds of plugins, you can add social networking components to your marketing site in minutes. Though this tool is mostly used for blogs, it can also be fantastic for creating small web marketing sites used for deploying specialty applications and for reaching a targeted audience.

If you have a creative department, you can try to tap that resource to create the look and feel. You can also get a very reasonably priced website template for your wordpress site from templatemonster.

Step 4: Start Spreading the News

Use the CMS tool to its full extent.

Have team members write about the whole creation process with the blogging tool. Create a twitter account and have a team member give updates on what is going on with the development of the product. You can use a twitter plugin for wordpress which can be found in the plugin section of the administrator to have it show up automatically on the site.

Get the Word Out

Spread the word throughout your organization and have them tell their friends and family about the application. Send out information via your email newsletter list. If you don’t have one of those, create one!

Get Feedback and Improve

You can create a forum on your site to get user’s feedback by using Simple Forum. Have people monitor the forum and read and respond to users requests or questions. By getting potential customers involved, you can learn from them and make your product better.

Here is a great tool for giving and getting feedback. It’s called Rypple. As you let more and more people see the application, have them use a tool like this to get feedback and organize it in a small fashion.