Most marketing campaigns are tailored to the Innovators and Early Adopters and then prematurely abandoned. I’ve been thinking about what a long term marketing plan would look like if it were based on the diffusion of innovation bell curve. Below is a marketing plan to build a sustained campaign that meets consumers at their level of product adoption rather than trying to get them to become innovators or early adopters.

Innovators
These people are itching to go first and be the ones to share with everyone else their opinion. Your objective here is to build buzz for everyone who comes later.

• Create coming soon trailers for the product. (Kickstarter is pretty much just a giant “coming soon” site for introducing new products)
• Seed product to a select few – typically niche bloggers and tastemakers who are hungry for exclusives and breaking news for their audiences
• Presale to the best customers and allow them to flaunt their exclusive invitation through social media
• Send an email to your best customers giving them first dibs, stroke their ego by giving them something to share that fits their personality
• Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook status updates are applicable here. Social media is short lived and focused on breaking news

Early Adopters
Encourage those that get a thrill out of being the first to explore, adopt and adapt. Make them the heroes on your site. This is as far as most project launches go.

• Create the hub of content on one your site. This page will be the place all in-bound links point to and aggregate all external content
• Gather the early reviews, re-tweets, reactions, youtube “unboxing” videos and sort them all on this dedicated category page on your site
• Use display ads hyper targeted to be on the most important niche blogs and sites of interest to the target audience
• Be as relevant as possible about the exciting new release

Early Majority
Social proof is important to the early majority. Leverage your content hub page to give them this proof.

• Use product reviews in emails to convince them of the consensus of the crowd to overcome their risk averseness
• Create content around the product – Highlight all the use cases that have been identified from the early adopters
• Paid search – broad category keywords to capture people who are in the market for your product but uneducated to your offering
• Incentivize affiliates to post about your offering

Late Majority
Statistical proof is important to the late majority – in their minds just because it’s popular doesn’t make it worth it.

• Build campaign landing page with keyword research and backlinks in mind to grow in organic rank in search engines (if your product is on the first page of google it must be good)
• Promote all reviews together in quantitative format showing average review over time
• Paid search – product specific keywords to capture people who know exactly what they are looking for
• Advertise on comparison shopping engines for these people who know what they want but are looking for the best deal
• Use remarketing display ads to remind past visitors of your offering to keep the purchase top of mind

Laggards
They are risk averse, skeptical and patiently waiting to make the best choice.

• Put it on sale
• Use affiliates to promote the product with coupon codes

Mostly all of these tactics can run in tadum (except for the tactics for innovators and laggards) because each customer is at a different point in the curve at a different time. Just because something doesn’t take off right away doesnt mean its not worth sticking with – especially online, it doesn’t take much effort to design something to last.