Make Digital Marketing Work

In discussion with prospects and clients, there seems to be one question that keeps returning no matter how many years go by and that is whether to sell directly online with eCommerce or to support existing sales channels.  Rather than deciding on how your sales channel is to be fed.  I think a better way of approaching this is whether your campaign is transactional (ie I can buy it more easily online) or non transactional (I want them to go and buy it somewhere else because that is easier for them and me).  It fits quite neatly into direct response and brand building.

If I sell music from my store of vintage vinyl, it will help me a lot if I offer this as an online order service and therefore provide direct response media that tells me what albums to wrap up and send where all across the world.  Direct response is perfect for me.  It is also playing to one of the Web’s strengths where time and place do not matter.  It means that me as a tiny little store in the middle of nowhere can compete as if I was an international company with a presence on every street corner.  I can be open 24 hours a day, every day and everybody in the world can access my store front.  This is why tiny niche offers can do so well online.  There may only be a million people in the entre world who need my product but through the web I can access every single one of them just as easily as I can access the three who live in my area.

If I am selling chocolate that can be bought on every street corner, direct response isn’t a lot of use to me because every customer can cross the street and buy my product a lot faster than I can send it by mail or courier.  I’ve also got this huge infrastructure in place that makes it available across the world.  Why would I want to compete with such a well established sales channel?  My task here is to support and strengthen my existing sales channels through all the means at my disposal of which online is one.

In this scenario conducting brand building marketing activity is a lot more beneficial.  I might try promoting why my chocolate is better than everybody else’s or give a special promotion code online so that customers can take it into their store to get added value.  I might ask my customers which of my chocolate they prefer at a given time and ask them for examples.  Do they cook with it, show me.  Is there some way I can make it better, tell me.  All these things combine to help me and my customer know each other better and help my distribution partners sell more of my product.

This is only scratching the surface though because I have assumed that simply advertising the fact that I have a product to sell is enough to get customers to buy it, when  organisations are starting to recognise the importance of an end to end online marketing strategy, which engages and builds trust to maximise the chances of a prospect becoming a customer.

There is no escaping the fact that we live in uncertain times, and as a humble agency we try to stay abreast of all the issues that might affect us.  We need to make decisions and predictions and so we do, but try not to bet the farm on something that could go against us and bring the whole world crashing down about us.

One thing is for sure and that the world is moving and turning and changing at a pace that is likely to catch anyone out at the moment if they are not very careful and even if they are you can still find yourself with a prime set of incisors lodged in your rear end.  Yesterday was one of those days and our thoughts are with those affected as various announcements caused global concern on the financial markets and another high street retailer went into administration.

It was only a few weeks ago that I was talking about Book publishing and made the statement that “shares in Waterstones are safe for the minute”.  I didn’t consider Border’s Books and that might be the problem.  Online retail has reached a pivotal moment of preference for consumers and there are at least two brands that most people have considered ‘first’ when it comes to online book retail.  For companies that are left with a predominantly store retail model, Christmas has been a saviour each year to keep the wolf from the door.  It is probably a combination of shifting purchase points to online and a less extravagant Christmas brought on by the prevailing economic conditions but I can’t help feeling that organisations who do only bet on physical stores for retail are going to find it harder and harder.  Certain items such as perishables will naturally appeal to the senses of touch and smell and therefore are not as close to the front line as those which have a shelf life but the writing is on the wall.  It is no longer a case of online being a risk, it is now a case that ignoring online or treating it as an ancillary channel is probably the riskiest strategy of all.

Could this be the last Christmas where we viewed online as anything other than the primary retail channel?