Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
People Will Buy… When They’re Ready
I grew up working in my dad’s bookstore, The Booksmith, in San Francisco. Believe it or not, this independent business is still thriving today on Haight Street. Having been around an offline retail business my whole life has given me a unique perspective of online commerce. The end goal for both offline and online businesses is the same – to sell – but for some reason many online businesses have adopted a marketing strategy that focuses on a “click here!” and “buy now!” strategy that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
I started thinking about this on a recent press tour with a client, Pheedo, who just announced a new type of online advertising, dubbed FeedPowered Ads, in which the content of the ad is updated in real-time by RSS feeds, but more importantly, the ad is a platform that allows web users to interact with that content in a variety of different ways including subscribing to the RSS feed, bookmarking the content, tagging it, commenting on it, and of course clicking through to the advertiser’s website. What this does, and I paraphrase Bill Flitter of Pheedo, is give consumers at all levels of the buying process ways to interact with your content.
Take the iTunes Music Store, for example. Stop by, and you won’t get the hard sell, just a easily navigable store where you can explore music, get recommendations based on your searches, receive ‘New Music Tuesday’ emails and comment on music you’ve listened to. Of course, purchasing music is an option too, but not the only option. Other similar sites like Rhapsody have floundered because they want you to buy up front – drop a flat fee right away and then go and get your music. Consumers don’t want that, they want their buying decision to be under their control and want to know exactly what they’re getting for their money.
The goal isn’t just to get the customer to click and buy, but to build a relationship or start a conversation, and give them some options without the hard sell. This idea is something that naturally occurs in offline retail businesses, like The Booksmith, and what makes the offline shopping experience much richer and more fulfilling. Customers come into the store and can browse books, read a few pages, ask for recommendations, attend author readings, etc.
On the other hand, today’s online ads whisk you directly to a product or webpage that basically offers you the options of buying or not. This is the equivalent of walking into the bookstore, being escorted straight to the science fiction section and then having to decide if you want to buy a book or not. I’m exaggerating a bit, but the fact remains that online, the options simply aren’t there, and the customer has very little control over the shopping experience.
The iTunes Music Store and Pheedo’s new ad unit move online commerce more in the direction of offline shopping and targets a much larger audience than the fraction of a percent of people that are ready to buy. There’s no doubt that a great banner ad can convert someone on the fence into a buyer, but developing a relationship with a potential customer, starting a conversation, and putting them in control of the shopping process is a proven offline strategy that leads to more loyal and long-term customers, and no doubt will have great success online as well.
Online Video and PR: A Perfect Match
Generally, PR firms are out talking to the media touting the next big thing and trying to drum up interest about their clients. It’s rare that we get a chance to talk about strategic initiatives that LaunchSquad is doing to add value to our clients. Well, this week was a bit different, and I must admit, it was fun talking to the media about LaunchSquad for a change.
On Monday, we announced a partnership with one of our clients, TurnHere, an Internet video studio, to add online video capabilities as a new service offering for our clients. We recently shot our first one with Pheedo, an RSS marketing company. It’s easy to think of how Pheedo can use this corporate profile video for various marketing and business development opportunities, but I think film could be an even more powerful tool for PR firms and how they do their jobs. Here’s the video:
At their core, PR people tell great stories about their clients. In the technology industry, we often work with early and growth-stage companies who are doing exciting things that have never been done before. We usually do that by using words, but the emergence of online video has opened the door to a more powerful medium — a tool that can be a more compelling and engaging way to capture the spirit of a company and convey the excitement from within.
TurnHere is a perfect match for us as a partner because they have the same goal of telling great stories (and over the past year we’ve developed a great relationship with them as their PR firm). TurnHere’s network of independent filmmakers work with companies to create an engaging and authentic experience with an emotional appeal that is far different than much of the user-generated content that exists today.
There has been a lot of hype lately about how social media like blogs, wikis and the like will forever change the PR landscape, but I don’t think online video is necessarily something revolutionary per se. It’s just another tool we can use to help get our clients’ stories out into the market.
One of my other favorite video sites, Beet.tv, a video blog founded last year by Andy Plesser, is making some great progress in this space.
To read more about the partnership, check out the coverage in Bulldog Reporter, ClickZ, and Marketing Shift.
We’re always looking for a great story to tell, so if you have one, let us know.
