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.
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