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Select, Don't Accumulate - cont'dAccumulation MarketingInternet marketing seems stuck in hey-want-a-cheap-watch mode: Get people to your site, then worry about how you get them to do what you need them to do. In the mid to late 1990's, this was the marketing strategy — getting “eyeballs” at any price. Which explains why most dot com boom companies died out. They implied they had something folks wanted, but they didn't. Or they did and couldn't deliver it. A good, more current example would be typical pay-per-click and search engine optimization techniques. Let's say you hire a big agency to make sure your bicycle tire company ranks #1 on Google. You sit at a shiny conference table in a gleaming conference room, while an impeccably dressed account executive describes how they'll triple or quadruple your traffic. Don't worry, she says — we'll measure return on investment, too. You charge back to your office, secure in the knowledge that millions of dollars await you. A month later, though, you're not as happy. You've spent thousands of dollars working with this agency, received glowing reports about high search rankings, traffic growth and clickthru percentages. But your sales haven't increased at all. You finally call them up and say Hey, what gives? The same impeccably dressed Account Executive (you assume — you're on the phone) tells you that traffic numbers have tripled, but sales aren't increasing. So you're paying more in advertising, and paying more for bandwidth, but you're not realizing any immediate sales. Uh, isn't that a bad thing?, you ask. Well, you're getting much more attention now, she replies, and that's a good thing. Your brand is more established, and you're casting a much larger shadow in your industry. OKaaaaay, you reply, but how is this helping my bottom line? You can practically hear Account Executive's eyes roll back behind designer frames. If more people know who you are, she says, they're bound to buy from you eventually. But they're not buying from me now, you point out. Where's most of this traffic coming from? Account Executive's fingers dance across a keyboard, and she says, We're paying $5 per click to get you top rank for the term “bicycle” — it's a great traffic generator. But I don't sell bicycles, you intone, fighting the urge to scream. I sell bicycle tires. You mean I'm paying to bring people to my web site who are shopping for bicycles? Sure, Account Executive chimes, they're bound to buy bicycle tires eventually. At this point, to keep your heart rate within limits, you hang up. That's accumulation marketing — AE's firm is getting people to your site by sweeping the broadest possible swath across an entire market sector. They're not trying to pre-qualify your customers beyond the fact that they're thinking about bicycles. They could be thinking about bicycle handlebars, complete bicycles, Bicycle-brand playing cards, or even little bicycles for trained parrots. You have no idea. So you pay to bring all of these people to your site. And you pay at least twice: First, you pay in click charges. Next, you pay in bandwidth costs — if your traffic doubles, chances are you'll start seeing higher bills from your hosting firm. Understand, this is not just about search marketing. Web marketers do the same thing with e-mail when they send untargeted messages to an entire customer database. Designers and information architects do it when they create a web site without a careful audience assessment. Strategic consultants do it, too, when they create broad personas and ignore the tighter niche audiences. Accumulation marketing doesn't have to be in-your-face. It takes many other, more subtle forms, too: Campaigns that over-generalize. I've had clients ask me to build “feminine” web sites because women will be their primary audience. Clearly that doesn't work — what if 75% of the women coming to the site don't like feminine design (whatever that means)? And what if they're wrong, and half the visitors are men? The resulting site would draw visitors because of the product, then lose them because of ill-matched content and a design that makes incorrect assumptions. A campaign built this way will accumulate lots of traffic, but fail to select the best potential customers. Campaigns that are ego-driven. A major manufacturer just revamped their web site. The old site, while not all that attractive, provided clear, fast access to all of their products. The new site, though, opens with a huge Flash animation that takes you on a tour of their facility. It actually shows you what kind of car the CEO drives (and no, they don't make cars). If you wait for the Flash animation to load, and then really examine the home page, you can find your way to their products. I don't care about their facility, frankly. I want to see the goods. So do the thousands of others who search for and find this manufacturer's site, every day. I'm sure the CEO is very proud of his web site. So is the design firm that built it. But as a communications tool, it's a gutter marketing tactic — people come to the site expecting one thing, and see another. Accumulation marketing is not based on selection of potential customers. It's relatively indiscriminate, leaving businesses and consumers frustrated. It grows out of broad assumptions about audience and strategy that are both unsubstantiated and inaccurate. Because of that, gutter marketing can rack up serious traffic numbers and fail utterly to generate any useful business. The Cure for Accumulation Marketing: Get SelectiveIt's easy to fix this problem. Repeat after me: I will Select. I will no longer Accumulate. Say it again: I will SELECT. I will no longer ACCUMULATE. Here are six steps to get selective and start practicing some real Internet marketing. It's up to you to follow it, and, if you're hiring an agency, hold them to it:
One caveat here — don't base decisions on a tiny sampling of data. If you got 4 visitors from an e-mail campaign, and none contacted you, that's probably indicative of a lousy campaign, not a low conversion rate. | ||