Testing and launching your brilliant ideas
Are you that business pro who just thought of this incredible way to get a load of new business?
(Well, incredible to you; until you put it into play and the world applauds your genius, creativity and credibility.) Here are three resources you can use to test and launch your ideas. You’ll also discover some successful campaigns where these technology sites helped attain a variety of unique goals.
99designs.com – Looking for a logo? An image that pops? You’ll find endless inspiration on this website. If you’re engaged in a product launch and need some imagery to match your company colors, spend some time here. The categories alone listed in 99designs should inspire you to get excited about generating new ideas.
This isn’t just about logos. Do you use clothing to brand yourself? Hoodies, hats or caps? I wanted to test a T-shirt logo for an international basketball competition in Auckland, New Zealand, where they’re known as Kiwis, after a native bird. The image I created, of a dribbling bird, was met with great enthusiasm by players and fans alike. How can you have some fun with your company wearables?
99designs is for ebook covers, brochures, greeting and business cards. They even offer design work for tattoos! Get noodling on ideas. Wander the site and get your creativity gene fired up.
Fiverr.com – One of the coolest resources online and easily one of the cheapest as well.
Animated videos to explain your offerings? Training videos to reinforce learning? Fiverr is a highly visual website and you’ll be delighted with the wild and wide range of video and animation ideas. I’m a huge fan of the trend to animate our sales and marketing stories. This is a very low-cost way to dabble in that space. Some of the more unique offerings for you to play with and test:
- Animating faces so you can add a voice file to anyone and they speak your mind. One example that pops up is Morgan Freeman. Donald Trump is there, too, as are animated characters whose mouths synch with the words you provide. Quick caution on this: Be careful of intellectual property violations. You can parody about anyone and that’s OK. Just don’t try to have a celebrity “endorse” your product or service and fool people into thinking it’s real.
- Whiteboarding services to promote your marketing pitches.
- Animated characters to use in video clips or simple images to catch the eye of your website visitor. Available in both 2-D and (more expensive) 3-D imagery.
- Live and animated spokespeople who can promote your offerings. Many of these pros are voiceover artists who have worked on-camera. They present a professional appearance for your site.
- Music videos! Not just background music, but full-blown music videos produced to tell your story, share your client’s success or more.
- A really nice feature on Fiverr is that each provider lists how many jobs they have in their queue. You can use this as a measure of their success or simply to gauge availability for more urgent projects.
Services are as low as $5. So test away. What would you like to try out first? Animate some testimonials or your company story. Get to Fiverr and start sampling the color and motion that comes with visual messaging.
Guru.com – My favorite resource for technical brainpower is a place where you can literally get anything done. Here’s a portion of the ideas I’ve tested and rolled out through Guru service providers:
I decided to turn some of my hilarious sales horror stories into cartoons and posted a request for artists. Take some written stories and turn them into a six- to eight-panel comic book page. The responses and range of skills were great, as was pricing. I had two Mad Magazine artists wanting $1,500 a page. Some artists showed me totally inappropriate samples for a business publication — like the gal who drew some skimpily dressed Amazon beauties, bursting out of animal skins and standing with a hand on the head of a gigantic tiger. Uh, not what I’m looking for, but great artwork. My chosen cartoonist? An award-winning talent from Bulgaria who cartooned a couple dozen pages of stories for around $2,000 — well worth the production of one of the most unique products I could imagine in the business world.
Boring PowerPoint? I was shocked at a sample set of slides a Guru designer gave me just this month. Kate Vergara was new to Guru and asked for a chance to show her skills. The project was to present highlights from the 50s, 60s and 70s. This was to let baby boomers revisit memories from an influential period in their lives. Kate went way beyond text and color and pooled hundreds of images into a beautiful montage of slides. Have a peek at one here.
One of my craziest and most unique creations was the design of a video game for salespeople. “Revenge of the Reps” is modeled after the classic “Ant City,” in which you used a magnifying glass to roast ants. In my version, a stolen laser point was used to zap buyers who rejected salespeople in humorous pop-up comments like, “I hate sales reps, my ex-husband was one.” Or “Call back once I’ve retired.” Why just swallow rejection when you can get revenge? My designer delighted me by making this three-level game customizable. The user could control what words showed up in the buyers’ pop-up bubbles. Games and apps are fairly easy to produce now and pricing varies. Check out providers thoroughly. High ratings and plenty of projects are the best validation you’ve found someone good.
Another project was to get an American Psychological Association (APA) researcher to pull all the studies on two topics: decision making and emotions. This was done for my next couple books, but it’s given me content for article writing, blog posts and more.
Get bold — crazy bold — with your marketing ideas. You now have three resources for affordable yet powerful technology at your fingertips. What will you do with what you now know? I’d love to know what you’ve accomplished, when you turn one of your creative concepts into reality.
Dan Seidman of GOT INFLUENCE? treasures business creativity. He is a three-time World Masters Gold Medalist, playing basketball for the U.S. Dan received the International Sales Training Leader of the Year in 2013 for his work developing the 544-page Ultimate Guide to Sales Training. Is your training truly improving sales team performance? It’s time to redesign. Contact Dan at Dan@GotInfluenceInc.com or 847-359-7860.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
