Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Assessing Market Potential

Or, in simple terms, “Don't dive into an empty pool.”

In the movie Field of Dreams, the Ray Kinsella character builds a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield based on a voice that mysteriously repeats, “If you build it, he will come.” That philosophy made for a great movie, but we don't recommend it as a customer-acquisition strategy. If you build it, you'll probably end up with a garage full of it — unless you take the time to figure out whether anybody's going to want it enough to pay for it.

Ken McCarthy, creator of The System Seminar for Online Marketing (www.thesystemseminar.com), once asked during a lecture, “If you were an Olympic diver, what would be the most important skill you could possess?” The answers varied — the ability to hold a triple gainer, strong core alignment, powerful legs, and so on — but Ken kept shaking his head no to each try. Finally, when the audience was getting really frustrated, he shared his answer: “The ability to tell if there's enough water in the pool before diving.”

In other words, find out whether there's a market — and what that market wants — before you commit large amounts of time and money to creating a business or a product (or to learning fancy marketing tricks to attract buyers).

Even in startup companies with new products that no one is searching for because no one knows they exist, AdWords can be an indispensible “customer validation” tool. The secret bible of Silicon Valley startups is Steve Blank's