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.

The first commercial use of the internet was by business looking to expand their marketplace.  It stands to reason that a local company looking to expand their business into national and global markets could find a fantastic medium online.  Anyone who could ship their products to the customer had a wealth of opportunity open to them and this is how eCommerce was born.

On the other hand, a traditional bricks and mortar local business that relies on local custom, can find the internet to be a baffling place. Dentists, hair salons, doctors, guitar teachers, mechanics and a whole host of other business types all fall into this bracket where their location is an important part of their appeal. Similarly their customers often make decisions based on location in tandem with their reputation and perceived value.  Location therefore becomes a hugely important factor.  Correlating this to an environment where time and place do not matter was a perplexing problem for a very long time.

I’ve heard advice given to local hairdressers to get involved in eCommerce operations which effectively meant they should abandon a business they knew for one they had no idea about.  That kind of advice is thankfully consigned to history now but some very big companies served up that kind of rubbish for a very long time.

The problem is that nobody is going to drive the length of the country to visit a dentist regularly, and the concept of the visiting dentist to London that comes to you from the Outer Hebrides didn’t catch on as far as I am aware.

For business such as these the online marketing strategy should include Google Local Search.  Other search engines also offer local search inclusion but Google is by far and away the simplest to set up in my view. By adding your details to the mapping anyone that uses location as a search term will see your information. There is still the need for it to be entered correctly and a marketer who is experienced in these things will be able to help you.  The results can be significantly better (and the costs significantly lower) using this method rather than trying to get to the top of Google’s rankings for the term “dentist”.  When you think about it, that is a pretty pointless goal to begin with.

All local businesses should be looking at Local Search as a promotional tactic.