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Don’t let an opportunity  pass without make sure your website is ready!

Marketers, whether packaged goods companies, clothing manufacturers or luxury retailers all need to adjust their efforts. The article goes on to state the they need to market to women’s “rational” side. We’ve been advising some of our clients about this very thing for months.

Position your items as basics, essentials, and smart buys.

I thought she had to be mistaken. As a small business owner, I get at least one coupon a week from different office supply stores (along with special offers from just about every other retailer you can imagine). They’re all pretty much the same, “Get $25 off your next purchase of $75 or more” or some variation on that general theme.

It got me to thinking. When I was a kid, I worked in a small corner drugstore after-school and on weekends. The day before a seasonal sale, the owner of the store would hand me a pricing gun and have me go around and change the price of the items that were going to be on sale. Actually, to be clear, he’d have me raise the price on the items that we were going to put on sale. That way, when the customer got their discount, they’d feel great because they thought they got a bargain, and the owner felt great because he was selling lots of merchandise without really discounting anything. It seemed wrong to me, but I was 15 and in no position to ask questions. That was a tiny local drug store in a small town, in anywhere USA, and it was decades ago. Could the mass retailers be employing that same strategy on a national scale?

Are they upping their prices and then sending us discount offers?

After my friend and I spoke, I did some spot-checking on my own. We moved offices recently, so we had purchased more supplies than usual in January. What we bought was basic for any expanding office. Things like large white boards, another laser printer, shredders, etc… In checking back on what we paid, I realized that prices at Office Depot had in fact gone up since January. I checked by SKU # and not by product name to be sure I was comparing apples to apples.

So, in essence, the special offers they send simply negate the increase in prices. I don’t mean to pick on Office Depot. I just happen to have receipts from them so I can be sure of the price changes. Has anyone else noticed this and if so, why haven’t we banded together and called them out on it?

Anyone with a Facebook or LinkedIn account has seen these groups built around hobbies, professional experience, or even location. They exist on large social networking sites as well as on a myriad of smaller, niche online communities. These groups are similar to the clubs that we belonged to in high school and/or college (i.e. chess club, ski club), and are where likeminded people can exchange information, ideas and ask questions. What social networking has done however is allow us to join groups on a large scale.

Why do people join groups? Mostly, people join groups as a way to express themselves. For example, I belong to multiple “online marketing groups” on LinkedIn, for two reasons:
1. To show anyone that looks at my profile that this is my passion and
2. Because I want to connect to likeminded people who are at the forefront of the industry, and I am interested in what they have to say.

For marketers, this provides an opportunity to communicate to a mass audience of people interested in their products or services without huge media expenditures. That doesn’t mean that targeting social networking groups is free. Successful, well thought out, focused social media campaigns take time and strategic thinking. When done well, they can provide businesses a great outlet to engage potential customers and reinforce their relationship with existing customers.

Not convinced? Let’s say your company manufactures ski equipment and you are holding a ski demo at Stowe Mountain in Vermont (for those who don’t know what a ski demo is, it’s where a ski manufacture provides free ski’s to customers for a day so they can try them out). If your company had groups on existing social networks, it’s easy to let them know about your demo. But beyond letting your own groups know, you can find other groups, related to Vermont Skiing and Skiing, and notify them of the promotion as well. It’s targeted messaging to exactly the group that would most want to hear your message.

Programmers write the code that makes the websites do what you want them to. Some programmers do this well and others don’t. Often, you won’t know which you’ve hired until after you’ve paid them and they’re long gone. It’s a concept similar to building a house. Two homes can look identical from the outside. One of those houses can be lived in for years without needing repairs. The other needs work done in a different place every week.

Neither of the two professionals above has a marketing background. Web designers are not marketers. Programmers are not marketers. You cannot put the two together and expect them build you a website that has a focused marketing message. And you really can’t expect them to effectively market that website online, offline or any other place.

You cannot expect this any more than you would expect your general contractor to go out and market your business after he built the physical building you work in. If after he hung the last door in the building he offered to do your advertising, you’d think he was nuts.

So, why do you think the guys who built your website can effectively market it?