In reading many of my favorite blogs I often get the sense that many Internet Marketers believe that some grand shift in how to effectively market online is taking place. I’m not sure if that’s so or not, I do think there’s a bit of evolution for Internet Marketing techniques happening though and wanted to share my thoughts on all this today.
The driving force that I can see behind what many feel is a grand shift is simply the growth of the social web. More and more people are trusting the recommendations of other people on social web sites rather than trusting where search engines tell them to go online. I’m a big fan of this myself. In fact, whenever I’m researching something non technical in nature online these days I actually check with several social web sites before hitting Google or Yahoo. I believe I’m getting better results this way and look forward to a time when I can use those sites for more technical information searches too.
It makes sense then that this change in how people are discovering or being guided to web sites shakes up the techniques used by Internet Marketers. For years SEO was the keystone of the business. You either paid for high profile advertising (which often never returned well anyway) or aimed for traffic coming from the search engines.
But today it’s possible to run a successful web site and not even be listed in search engines. Now, I wouldn’t suggest making that your goal…but it can be done thanks to the rise of social networks online. I know sites that are pulling in thousands of visitors daily from various social networks, and that kind of traffic can be very profitable.
So far I’ve just been agreeing with what I’ve read on other blogs about the changes, but here is where I split with what appears to be becoming the conventional thinking out there. Many IM’ers seem to think that this change in how people are finding sites also indicates a clear change in how they’re viewing and approaching their consumer activities too.
Over and over I’m reading that you can’t sell to the social crowd online. That they have to be “fooled” or creatively manipulated to go from visitor to consumer mode.
I think that’s rubbish. People need and want products. That hasn’t changed. People don’t like to be hit with a “hard sell”, but that too has been true for as long as I’ve been involved with retail online and off since 1986.
The way I see it–and this is born out for me by the fact that I have several sites which thrive on social web traffic and I haven’t changed how I promote sales on them at all–is that if you just let visitors know that you think they’d enjoy or benefit from some product or service, and make a clear case as to why you think so without any unnecessary hype or theatrics you can easily convert social web traffic into consumers.
Lets remember that in most cases they’ve come to your site looking for something, and not only looking for something, but having been referred to your site by a real person as the place to find that something. These are targeted visitors and they don’t need to be given a hard sell, fooled or manipulated in any way. Just as with targeted traffic from a search engine, you simply have to show them what they need to do to get what they’re looking for from you in a clear manner.
That’s been the same since I started selling products online 12 years ago. Have a clear course of action for your visitors once they reach your pages to get from page load to transaction, and be sure to under promise and over deliver in order to convert one time buyers into repeat customers. That’s the mechanics of a successful sales page and I haven’t seen anything from social web traffic that really suggests this has changed.
I think the growth of the social web has changed how people browse online, but not how they shop. What do you think?
