If traditional advertising still works for you, I bet you aren't really advertising. You're persuading. Persuading is what matters , n that’s what advertisement n marketing campaign don’t do , or may I say , it is just the nature of advertisement n marketing people , who unlike salesman , advertisement n marketing works by going around the bush . The target of a business is to increase sales , but what they do is decorate , playing with words n colours , rhetoric , dancing around to make people feel good , but the problem advertisement / marketing effort whatsoever , don’t turn people to buy the goods / services .
Before I explain, let me ask u ,what is the difference between SALES n MARKETING ?
Truth is, they're almost identical. Or they should be. The only true difference between the two is the ability to accurately measure cause and effect. It's easier to fire an ineffective salesman than an ineffective ad firm. At least, it used to be. Ineffective advertising has finally been exposed, n , like a vampire, it's withering away under the rays of sunlight.
Where does the light come from? Web analytics. Web analytics is a cure for not only bad advertising but also bad sales. We can now measure the effects of offsite ads and online conversion. We can measure what actually happens rather than speculate. We see when email or banners are working but the site is failing. We know more about our customers, what they do, and in some cases why they do it.
Slowly, companies are getting wise to this ability to measure the buying and selling processes. Online, READ-ability is built in at every turn . Result of marketing n advertisement can be read . Companies are posing questions about their offline campaigns. They're losing patience with advertising and all its promises. It's not that advertising is getting worse. Actually, it seems better n more relevant. It's just too little, too late.
Sure, the Internet has a hand in taking advertising down , showing their terrible ineffectiveness . But there are other factors:
Media fragmentation. TiVo, iPods, hundreds of cable channels, satellite TV n radio, podcasting, Web sites, even PS2 n computer games cut people's time and attention into thousands of teeny fragments. Advertisers have a harder time reaching large population segments. They spend more to reach fewer people. They used to reach the masses with buys on three TV networks; now, they must buy on 92 stations to get the same reach.
Communication acceleration/information availability. Word-of-mouth advertising and
SALESMAN-ship move faster than ever. Bad news about your business or a failure to live up to advertising claims cancel out any image-control advertising. Even great advertising can't serve as a smokescreen for poor selection, an inferior product, and dismal customer service. Slick catalogs n marketing claims can't detract from Dell's CRM's failing or help customer lifetime value, for example. You can fool a lot of people once, but it's much harder to do it twice.
Overemphasized demographics. Demographic targeting has long been the focus of marketing efforts. Problem is, it only tells you where customers might be, not what messages they might respond to.
Creative, rather than persuasive, ad firms. It's revealing only one exec brought up the term MEASURE-able. Also, no one mentioned "results." Clearly, many ad firms still don't get it. If they don't consider MEASURE-ability n results, their advertising are the same as internet spam.
Old-school advertising can't be resuscitated. The landscape has changed. Advertising must morph into something different. Advertising alone isn't enough. Architect a persuasive experience as opposed to broadcasting only what a company wants people to know. u'll inject relevance into every customer touch point no matter where the customer experiences the company or where he is in the buying process.
Companies that best manage and coordinate the customer experience from first touch to post-sale are the ones that will succeed in the future:
They'll learn how to persuade customers in a manner they prefer.
They'll be able to demonstrate relevance to many different buyer types in all stages of the buying cycle by infusing relevance into every touch point.
They'll be able to transform one-time buyers into enthusiastic repeat buyers.
I take website advertising for example . most of the work focuses on what happens when people arrive at their Web sites. Yet we find online persuasive efforts have a back-reaching effect on advertising efforts and a forward-reaching effect on offline sales efforts.
Online persuasion is a great breeding ground for relevant messaging and experiences. It can be used across advertising and sales efforts. In this respect, online marketers have a leg up over their traditional counterparts.
Do you persuade customers or shout advertising messages at them, hoping you can drag them kicking and screaming to your cash register.
Developers, designers, and marketers -- however talented and dedicated -- simply do not know enough about professional selling. It's not where their expertise lies. Yet building and promoting a site that doesn't "know" how to sell is like building a beautiful brick-and-mortar store with a confusing layout, stocking it with great stuff, but then not hiring any salespeople.
For all that's being written about various marketing strategies, success in business – trading-corporate whatsoever, as in any business, isn't about marketing or about design; it's about sales , I repeat can u sell ur stuff .
Ultimately, it's about the conversion rate: ,say, the percentage of visitors your site can turn into buyers. Lots of dot-coms have turned into dot-bombs because even though they spent tons of money on "sexy" designs and tons more driving traffic to their sites, they overlooked the tiny fact that they needed to sell to visitors once they arrived at the site. The sad thing is, many of those visitors would have bought happily and could have left delighted.
Now, imagine pulling these circles apart, so sales moves farther and farther away from marketing. How much buying do you have left? (Hint: Less and less until you have none. Zero. Nada.) Now imagine pushing these circles together, so sales and marketing increasingly overlap. What are you seeing? How much your buying will increase!
Before your potential customers arrive at your web site, they are exposed to a lot of external messages and compare those messages to their internal desires and values. This is where marketing plays an important role in creating the propensity to buy. But as soon as a visitor begins to interact with your "digital store," all the marketing in the world isn't going to save you if your site doesn't know how to sell.
Think of it this way. You see an advertisement on TV in which a car manufacturer tells you it makes the safest car out there, and the ad prominently displays lots of images of an adorable, safe baby and happy parents enjoying their worry-free car ride. Suppose you've got a baby. You want him or her riding in the safest car. You think maybe you should look into buying this car. So you and your baby head to the nearest dealership that sells this car.
You walk in with the propensity to buy, but you still need to be sold on the product. You have questions about options, service, and which model would best suit your needs. You want to be treated like you matter. You want to feel good about the decision to buy. Without a salesperson holding your hand throughout the sales process, treating you the way you want to be treated, and selling to you the way you want to be sold to, you probably aren't going to buy a thing from this dealership, even if it does sell the safest car in the world.
Think of a smaller-ticket item. I wanted to buy a photo-quality printer because I'm playing around with digital cameras these days. I came across an advertisement that promised the product would give me "superior quality at the incredible price of $175." I enthusiastically trotted off to that store and found myself standing in a huge aisle filled with printers.
All of a sudden, I started wondering if maybe there wasn't an even better printer for my needs. I pushed a few of the test buttons and got some test printouts. Holding them in my hand, I looked for a salesperson. There was no one around. I read some of the fact sheets but had more questions. There was still no salesperson in sight. I now have the printouts on my desk, but I didn't buy a printer.
Marketing got me to the store, but it didn't result in a sale. Had someone bothered to help me, I might have bought that RM450 printer. If this same person were good at selling, he or she might even have been able to make me feel good about buying the next model up (up-selling) or adding a cable, an extra toner cartridge, and some paper to my order (cross-selling). Or he or she might have helped me figure out that I really would be better off with a different brand.
It just as easily could have gone another way, but one that would have been just as bad: Even without the benefit of a salesperson, I might have bought that RM450 printer, carted it home, installed it, and then been dissatisfied with my purchase. And if I'd bought it and it worked fine? I would still be wondering if I'd gotten the best deal for my needs, which still leaves me somewhere short of being completely delighted. So, the end result in that case is that I'm not likely to return (customer retention) to that store because it hasn't shown that it acknowledges and values the role of sales -- which is another way of saying that it doesn't acknowledge and value me!
Are u getting the idea? Shoppers want to buy, and they do want to be sold to. They don't, however, want to be "pushed." Yet the average conversion rate on the web is only 2 percent, while the average conversion rate in the brick-and-mortar world is approximately 50 percent.
Do you think just maybe there's something big that's lacking in the way e-commerce sites function?
By all means, drive traffic to your site. But look at the Venn diagram, and you can clearly see that marketing alone must fail. In order to sell more of anything, you need to do more selling. It is that simple.
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