Some Marketing Thoughts
This is something that popped into my head while writing an unrelated article, and I have to get it OUT of my head so I can finish writing the article. Bear in mind this is train of thought with very little editing, so it may get rambly or unfocused.
You hear a lot about the four P's of marketing, but hardly anyone ever talks about the four C's. The four C's are Consumer, Cost, Convenience, and Communication. They sit opposite Product, Price, Place, and Promotion respectively.
The basic difference between the two is that when you are selling a product, the four P's are very much on your mind. When you are buying a product, it's the four C's that are on your mind - they're the way your customer thinks. If you want to make conversions, it's the four C's that do it down at the micro-level. (I'm using micro- and macro- in a pseudo-economic sense: microeconomics is about one transaction, macroeconomics is about lots of transactions.) While you're trying to maximise your profits, exposure, and all the things YOU want out of your marketing, the customer has different goals. Understanding your customer and delivering what he wants will ultimately be the higher-quality approach.
Now I'm going to cover the four C's individually. Consumer refers to the person who is viewing your marketing message - this is a single person in your target market. He doesn't care what most people in his niche want. He cares what he himself wants. The closer you match what he is trying to find, the better off you'll be. In an affiliate context, the better you can match his search terms AND his mental image, the more likely he is to convert. If he wants to buy something manufactured, an ebook on how to make one himself might be your best product for various reasons... but you'll convert him more readily if he can just buy the product.
Cost is closely related to price, obviously, but it's a bigger question than that. Lots of us "give away" reports for "free" via email. The price isn't really nothing, it's "a valid working email address monitored by a real human being". Cost is the same way. To use the ebook analogy above, the cost of an ebook on making something is not just the price of the book - it's the time and money necessary to get and assemble the pieces. Think carefully about hidden costs, like an object you can't easily buy; just pointing your customer to a site where he can order that will reduce his cost dramatically, and even if you don't make an affiliate profit, the added conversions might very well be worth it.
Convenience is related to cost. How convenient is it to get your product? Amazon's one-click ordering is the holy grail in this space, and the closer you can get to it, the better. I can't count the number of times I've gone looking for something, found a product I wanted, and just lost interest when I saw the size of the order form. It's that easy to lose a conversion. Time is money, as they used to say, although my personal favorite statement about the internet economy is David Shapiro's "attention is the currency of the future".
Communication is the last point I'm going to hit, and this goes in three different directions. First, you have the question of how well you communicate to the consumer that this will meet his needs. Second, you have the question of how easily the consumer can communicate those needs to you if he is nervous - this is critical! If you aren't communicating well in the first sense, the consumer's questions will tell you exactly what you're doing wrong. And finally, you have...
Actually, scratch that, I don't know what the third one is. Maybe there are five or six. Hey, this is train of thought, and it's nine AM so I have to get the kids out of bed and say the Shema and give them breakfast and whatnot.
Thanks for letting me clear my brain a bit. Let me know if any of this helps you at all, or if you have something to add; it might turn into a formal article at some point.
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