A while back I wrote what I thought was a fairly innocuous overview of the Fundamentals of Marketing and Sales. Basically, I said nothing more controversial than that your business will be more successful if you understand what your customers like and don’t.
Much of the response was “yes, of course”, but I was surprised at the amount of pushback from the web commerce contingent. Objections centered around 2 sentiments (apologies if I over simplify):
1. The web, and all the personal electronic communications tools attendant to it, are so easy and accessible that there is no longer a need for marketing to build a bridge between suppliers and customers.
2. The breadth and the anonymity of the web make it unnecessary and largely impossible to identify and speak to specific customer segments and their concerns.
Always open to new ideas and a new slant on things, I’ve thought a fair amount about the issue of marketing and web commerce. Here’s where I come out:
1. The web is a very efficient tool for OUTBOUND communication. You can broadcast your message just as quickly as you can assemble it, at a nearly insignificant cost. The big question mark, of course, is how to broadcast it so that your message gets seen and acted upon by people who matter.
2. The web can be a very inefficient tool for INBOUND communications. While there’s essentially no limit to the amount of information out there somewhere, actually finding it is an often cumbersome and frustrating exercise, with lingering uncertainty over the reliability and completeness of the result.
3. The web bombards your potential customers with nearly limitless options. Your message competes for your customers’ limited attention span not just with other products like yours, but with every other distraction that email, FB friends, and GOOGLE search can put between you and your customers’ SSS.
4. The web is a wonderfully efficient vehicle to educate and motivate interested prospects you’ve already made a connection with.
5. The web is a wonderful TRANSACTION MEDIUM for motivated buyers – except of course, when it isn’t. Web commerce work well for standardized products / services that customers can confidently buy sight unseen or for items that consumers can preview at brick-and-mortar stores.
So …. The web and personalized electronic communications provide powerful new avenues for suppliers to broadcast their messages and educate interested prospects, and for motivated buyers to execute their purchases. To the casual or uninformed shopper, it offers vast but undifferentiated information, almost all of which is irrelevant and distracting to the purchase decision process.
Bottom Line? Web based businesses need market just as much – perhaps substantially more – than their brick-and-mortar cousins. Identifying which consumers are your most likely to spend their $$$ with you, learning where you’re most likely to find them in the electronic communications universe, and understanding how to make your message stand out amid all the clutter are quintessentially marketing functions. Businesses that ignore these principles are headed for failure, regardless of their venue.
