In a perfect world, nobody would visit your website
| 10 October 2008
| After all was said and done with the Wall Street bailout, the more I thought about it, 700 billion was a really large number. In fact, 1 billion is a really large number. It so happens that in the next month Lasoo.com.au will reach 1 billion offer impressions; that is, it will have served up 1 billion offers to a targeted audience of shoppers in excess of 5.8 million – with a 24% in store conversion rate (according to Nielsen). That is about 31 targeted offers every second.
With all of this retail consumer demand from the Australian market being aggregated in one place, why is there reluctance to engage in content aggregation? For many it is old business models and organisational structures still adapting and accepting the terms of engagement in a two way media, for others it is a fear of letting go – letting go of information, letting go of obfuscation, letting go of small print terms and conditions and letting go of traditional notions of media management in a consolidated media environment.
For retailers, this fear of letting their information go is largely irrational – their information does have some value, but it is largely only realised when it is off their own website – be it pushed through social networks, ending up in email inboxes, sitting embedded in phone, web and desktop widgets, or existing in search engines.
Retailers sit in a unique position on the web, where their value is derived from a service that, unlike information, is very hard to copy. When all of their profits are derived from making sales, then making things easier to buy should be the core focus of any marketing strategy. This is achieved by expanding the reach of messages, the reach of distribution and the reach of transaction systems.
This extension of transaction systems is evident in search engines like Google and Lasoo.com.au displaying “Google Checkout” and “Buy It Now” links.
If we begin future gazing to imagine the perfect online marketing strategy for retailers, then using visitors to a website as a KPI seems totally defunct. If I can have transactions occur where my messages are, and my messages where my consumers are – why do I want them to come to my website? You don’t, not unless you are selling ad space there as an extra revenue stream in the same way that retailers are now renting out store space – which is actually a pretty good idea if they can make the ads relevant.
In a perfect world, nobody would visit retailer websites. In the ideal consumer universe, the consumer is at the centre of it and the right retailers come to my website, Facebook page, phone interface, browser etc.
With this in mind, it is sales figures that should be guiding strategic planning, not visitors to your website. Despite “visitors” currently being a relatively good performance metric, it falls short in completely satisfying the retailer’s ultimate goal – sales, now and for the future- unless of course you track visitors to the offer – which is an excellent metric.
Extending this reach is all to satisfy one golden rule, be easier to buy from than your competition. If there is one thing that any industry should have learnt by now, it is that. In today’s climate of instant gratification, making your product easy to buy is priority number one. Without this, all of the marketing legwork has been done for the benefit of another company.
In the competitive marketing environment that is rapidly fragmenting we see companies piggy backing on other people’s marketing spend time and time again. It happens when companies run TVC’s and don’t buy the related keywords in search engines, it happens when geographic distributions don’t match marketing distributions, it happens when companies try to take too much consumer information at point of purchase, it happens when companies bid on your brand terms in your absence, it happens when Bit-torrent is a better alternative than getting controlled by the TV schedule – in short – it happens all the time.
So who is making purchasing simple, and what do they have in common? It is being done by Sony Playstation, iTunes, Paypal, Google Checkout and the phone carrier networks to name a few. The thing that they all have in common is that the payment system is integrated into the platform.
With this in mind, the challenge left to marketers is how do you get your messages to the platforms used by my target audience? How do you extend your transaction systems to integrate with those platforms? How do you adequately service this newfound demand? In answering those questions you will have lifted the “burden” of people having to visit your site.
This article appeared in Digital Media
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