Another bit of absolute gold from Jeff on his post called 10 Key Strategies To Make Your Website an Inbound Online Marketing Machine published Dec 18 2009.
Which agrees with the perception set out by Seth Godin recently.
The Scarcity is not all about the product
There is definitely a trend in new media about how to put the creative back in digital. Information is free, it is not scarce, the ability to do cool and money making things is not scarce either. Companies that try to charge high prices and not sell as much are fading while companies that offer something for less and sell a lot are coming through.
Look at email marketing, 5-10 years ago, email marketing itself was a scarcity. 5 years ago my mates at Pure360 - all 5 of them at the time (now there's 55!), were selling email marketing and not the software, slowly over the years the basics of how to do it and the need for that marketing produced more software, some of it from agencies who had big brands with that need built their own. Now everyone knows what email marketing is and how to do it you're pitch is very different.
Now the market is flooded with ESPs of differing quality and service levels. Now the scarcity is in the features and the service and no-one has the right to demand the large sums of money for the privilege of sending track-able emails.
The experience gets the deal
Much like Seth's Lemonade stand post: "The lesson from two lemonade stands" where one stand give a quick, efficient and unremarkable service and the other takes a bit longer but the product is of better quality and you walk away feeling good about your experience.
Jeff speaks of the same thing but more targeted to digital marketing. People will pay what they believe is a reasonable price for something but there will be many offerings at that price, so how to do you choose? You buy the people!
If you have two products the same or even if product A is slightly better but the person you talk to, to get product A is a complete A-hole you will go with product B. If product B leaves you with a great feeling of confidence and even joy, product A would have to be one spectacular product even with a standard experience.
Socialisation starts the experience
All of this is what socialisation media has emphasized and brought to the forefront of marketing. Everyone is accountable all the time, communication cannot be controlled, information is free, time is short and so are attention spans.
We have to frequently distribute small nuggets of useful and preferably remarkable content. Use your web-site as the store and source of that content and add links and headlines to all of your social networks feeds to ensure you are able to get it to everyone who wants it, they way they want it.
The only argument against that is the undeniable popularity of White Papers, but there is a novelty value there and if every other tweet linked to white paper, they wouldn't be popular. In fact often a white paper is an amalgamation of lots of small content into one big 'manual'.
So follow Jeff, follow Seth and make sure you keep your interactors happy!
Which agrees with the perception set out by Seth Godin recently.
The Scarcity is not all about the product
There is definitely a trend in new media about how to put the creative back in digital. Information is free, it is not scarce, the ability to do cool and money making things is not scarce either. Companies that try to charge high prices and not sell as much are fading while companies that offer something for less and sell a lot are coming through.
Look at email marketing, 5-10 years ago, email marketing itself was a scarcity. 5 years ago my mates at Pure360 - all 5 of them at the time (now there's 55!), were selling email marketing and not the software, slowly over the years the basics of how to do it and the need for that marketing produced more software, some of it from agencies who had big brands with that need built their own. Now everyone knows what email marketing is and how to do it you're pitch is very different.
Now the market is flooded with ESPs of differing quality and service levels. Now the scarcity is in the features and the service and no-one has the right to demand the large sums of money for the privilege of sending track-able emails.
The experience gets the deal
Much like Seth's Lemonade stand post: "The lesson from two lemonade stands" where one stand give a quick, efficient and unremarkable service and the other takes a bit longer but the product is of better quality and you walk away feeling good about your experience.
Jeff speaks of the same thing but more targeted to digital marketing. People will pay what they believe is a reasonable price for something but there will be many offerings at that price, so how to do you choose? You buy the people!
If you have two products the same or even if product A is slightly better but the person you talk to, to get product A is a complete A-hole you will go with product B. If product B leaves you with a great feeling of confidence and even joy, product A would have to be one spectacular product even with a standard experience.
Socialisation starts the experience
All of this is what socialisation media has emphasized and brought to the forefront of marketing. Everyone is accountable all the time, communication cannot be controlled, information is free, time is short and so are attention spans.
We have to frequently distribute small nuggets of useful and preferably remarkable content. Use your web-site as the store and source of that content and add links and headlines to all of your social networks feeds to ensure you are able to get it to everyone who wants it, they way they want it.
The only argument against that is the undeniable popularity of White Papers, but there is a novelty value there and if every other tweet linked to white paper, they wouldn't be popular. In fact often a white paper is an amalgamation of lots of small content into one big 'manual'.
So follow Jeff, follow Seth and make sure you keep your interactors happy!
