Imagine that you’re in the market for the Blueray boxset of all 6 seasons of Lost. Consider the following online stores…

• unknown-entity.co.uk – £120
• amazon.co.uk – £130

Which of the above would you buy from?

If you’re like most people, you’ll buy from Amazon. Why? Because you’ve bought from them before and you you can trust them…

• If it’s defective they’ll replace it
• It gets lost in the post they’ll send you another
• It will arrive tomorrow
• They have a long established history of actually doing the above

It’s the last point that matters most. Any online store can say it will replace a damaged item, but how do you know they’re telling the truth? And if it gets lost (or stolen) enroute, you may well have a battle on your hands convincing an unknown estore that you’re telling the truth.

The thing that makes a client hover over the ‘buy’ button without clicking is doubt. It’s the #1 killer of sales. Doubt should be on the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list.

The key to overcoming doubt is trust. The question is, how do you overcome trust if nobody will buy form you in the first place? There are several strategies you can pursue…

• Make it impossible to say no by offering something at a silly price, just to establish that first sale. Consider this to be a cost of marketing
• Build trust over time by establishing a different kind of relationship, such as a supplier of knowledge or assistance
• Borrow trust from another organisation, such as Amazon’s own stores product
• Collect at least 30 video testimonials from genuine customers. This provides overwhelming evidence of your trust-worthiness. Unlike written testimonials, it’s easy to spot a fake on video and this makes them inherently trust-worthy
• Continue to communicate with prospects for years. This keeps your name in front of people, but also implies trust through longevity (i.e. you’re not a fly-by-night organisation)
• Incorporate and include your company registration number on your site, with a link to its Company’s House record. It helps present the idea that you’re a real company, thus overcoming some doubt. The longer you’ve been incorporated, the more trust this approach conveys
• Invest in viral marketing if your products/services and target market are suitable. Because viral marketing depends on friends passing the item on, it carries a degree of credibility with it
• Ask clients to personally recommend you to their friends, colleagues and associates

Which of the above strategies should you use in your business? Use all that are useful. The more trust you convey to your clients, the less doubt they’ll feel when hovering over the buy button.

direct selling, eselling, sales, web sales

Ask 5 web marketing experts how they think businesses should use social media, and chances are, you’ll get 5 different answers. Maybe more.

My own view is that any use of social media is valid if it supports the business. There isn’t one correct way to use social media. I’ve seen social media used successfully to do the following…

• Generate leads
• Raise awareness about a new product
• Provide customer service
• Get feedback from clients
• Communicate with customers
• Take the place of custom components on a website

The plain fact is, social media provides two things of use to a business…

1. A set of web-based tools that achieve specific tasks
2. A built-in community of users

These are both useful to a business, but the second is an irresistable lure to a business that gets in the way of understanding the potential of the media. The existing community is seldom interested in anything the business has to say.

I think the key to making use of social media isn’t to try and exploit the existing community, but to build your own community. That needn’t be orientated toward sales either.

One of my suppliers uses Twitter to post real-time technical updates when things go wrong. This keeps all their customers information, and ensures the technical staff are free to focus on the problem instead wasting time answering the same questions over and over again.

One of my clients uses Blogger as its News page (i.e. press releases and related snippets of news), rather than create a custom component on its website. The built-in features of Blogger are ideal for this purpose. And it has the added SEO benefit of being hosted on an external domain. Over time, the news ‘page’ has gained PageRank and so increases the client’s exposure in Google (who own Blogger).

business, social media

Social media is all well and good, but does it have any practical marketing application? Of course it’s immediately embraced by the woolly side of the marketing community, where ‘top of mind’ and ‘buzz’ are taken seriously. But what about the hard-nosed world of direct marketing?

In the direct marketing world things are measured properly, and any new idea is only taken on board if it can be tested and shown to work (i.e. impact directly on the bottom line).

Social media does indeed have a role to play in the hard-nosed world of measurable marketing. There are several ways to make use of it…

• Social media can be used to provide client service. And yes, I do consider client service to be an essential ingredient in the marketing mix. Take a look at this real-world example.
• Social media can be used as a source of leads in lead generation. Here’s an example.
• This guy uses Facebook to generate 80% of his business. His story is very interesting, and I plan to write about it someday (if he’ll let me).

There’s another way to use Social Media to generate traffic direct from the application itself. This involves cooperating with an organised group dedicated to helping each other out. Here’s how…

Let’s say you start the ball rolling by bookmarking a recent blog entry in your Delicious account. You then email everybody else in the group and ask them to do the same. If your group has 10 members, your bookmark will occur 10 times in Delicious. For some keywords, that’s enough to get it onto page one.

If your group has 100 members, your bookmark will occur 100 times in Delicious. That’s enough get to most content onto page one, and pick up visitors from Delicious. There may well be additional benefits associated with being on page one of a major category in Delicious.

And of course, Delicious is only one of several social bookmarking applications. This can be rolled out across all of them.

Are you interested in putting such a concept to use in your business? If so, here’s what you need…

1. A Delicious account
2. A willingness to cooperate with others on a quid-pro-quo basis
3. Some form of regular content creation (e.g. a blog, video series, podcast, slide show/presentation series)

Assuming you meet these minimum criteria, get in touch with me and let me know you’re interested.

social media, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing

A new search engine purports to search social media sites in real time. It’s called Bliipa, and it offers some interesting possibilities. For example…

• Find out who’s talking about you
• Find out who’s talking about your competitors
• Monitor chatter about keywords you’re interested in, and join in (i.e. better target your conversion)
• More easily find people you can form alliances with

The major search engines have (so far) been unable to provide real time search on social media sites. Bing does monitor certain sites, and I wondered whether or not Bliipa was monitoring less known sites.

To test this, I entered text from specific feeds I placed on my own Twitter page. Sure enough, Bliipa found them. This looks like a fantastic new tool, and something web marketing folk can put to very good use.

No tags

From the outside in, social media marketing appears to be free. Social media sites are free to use, as are almost all of the utilities that make it easier to integrate them.

Sounds good, right? Almost too good.

And it is too good to be true. The plain fact is, social media marketing isn’t free. It takes time to…

• Prepare a social media marketing strategy
• Create a social media marketing plan
• Implement the plan
• Analyse the results

Somebody has to do this work. If it’s you, you’re paying an opportunity cost. If it’s a professional, you’re paying a premium for expertise (hopefully recovered by superior results).

Recently a professional social media marketer told me she spent at least 4 hours per day on social media sites. It’s her bread and butter, so I suppose it’s not as surprising as it first seems. Yet I can’t imagine investing that amount of time working sites like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and the like.

Social media may purport to be a wonderful new marketing tool that changes all the rules. Despite the hype, I suspect the fundamental law of economics still applies: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Social Media Marketing