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Customer Acquisition 2.0: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Game
People now have access to so much content — and have so many ways to gather news and information — that the likelihood of your corporate message penetrating the clutter is virtually nil. Instead, if you engage the audience in a conversation and learn what the social community is looking for and concerned about, you might be able to persuade them to hear your message. In other words…
“There is no market for your message.”
David Weinberger
2007 New Communications Forum Lecture
Let’s take a big step back for a moment and realize how selling on the Web is quickly becoming less about marketers’ supply meeting up with customers’ demand, and more about customers themselves actively bringing their demand toward supply. In fact, they’re CREATING supply in many cases… and taking action to monetize that supply in a niche community setting. That should sound familiar to Revenews readers 
Given the Web’s increasingly social nature, today’s customers are increasingly bypassing “interceptive” strategies like search and, yes, affiliate marketing. No, affiliate marketing isn’t dying or threatened but it IS challenged to change. How? Affiliates are being asked to do more than just shuttle traffic and get ‘in between’ demand and supply.
Similarly, affiliate networks are challenged to house more than just ‘helpful interceptors’ (search affiliates) or partners that provide access to incentivized yet existing customers (coupon and loyalty shopping partners). Marketers expect networks to provide value-added resellers. Or as Revenews blogger, David Lewis refers to them, “value added pre-sellers.” Affiliates that go the extra mile to close the sale — an sale that they, otherwise, wouldn’t otherwise have a chance at. Yet is this expectation of affiliates realistic in a world that loves to shop around? (we’ll revisit the ‘last cookie wins’ issue later… that’s another subject!)
Getting back to the consumers… shoppers are increasingly choosing a variety of non-traditional paths to discover products and services — faster and easier than ever before.
Says Jupiter Research:
Social and community sites affected the purchase decisions of 51% of online shoppers aged 18-24. This is far beyond any other age group, which averaged less than 26%. A total of 36% of online shoppers influenced by social/community sites said they buy offline even though they use online social/community sites to make their decisions.
So what’s a savvy marketer to do?
The answer may seem radical. Today’s marketers must help customers find, consider and purchase products and services by creating authentic digital experiences. That’s the new twist - and it’s not just a load of hyped-up social media spin.
This new experience-based paradigm will be fueled by the recently announced Data Portability Working Group. This consortium of unlikely partners (including Plaxo, LinkedIn, Google, Sixapart, Facebook and Yahoo’s Flickr) are banding together to ensure users of the “social Web” can have power over the data they’re putting out there. By making sure social media sites and services are inter-operable the user experience becomes simple, the social information portable and shared. It’s the first step toward providing marketers with a serious “social marketing platform.”
How exciting is that?! Well, perhaps it’s just a pipe dream given how things are playing out. Open source sounds great but it requires everyone to actually get along! What do you think?
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Welcome back Jeff! Great post to mark your return.
Welcome back, Jeff!
‘value added pre-sellers’
exactly - As an affiliate manager I am looking for serious affiliates who are willing to market on my behalf.
What we do need are affiliates who pre-sale - market - sell - give testimonials and then send over high quality converting customers.
As was said on A Best Web recently - put the marketing back in Affiliate Marketing
Inherently a good affiliate partner is one who actually puts thought behind their marketing strategy.
The fact that there is a proliferation of publishers in the industry that don’t give any thought to that process, I blame on merchants. Merchants in their drive to post huge numbers in terms of growth often look the other way when it comes to questionable tactics if not out right encouraging those tactics.
Merchants, if you want affiliates who really think about marketing, think about pre-sale, then treat them as a real partner and encourage best practices in your program.
Hi Jeff,
Great post! Completely agree: Helping people buy what they want and demand is always the shortest way to marketing success and profits.
Have a great weekend!
-Ola
All network enabled merchants years ago pulled the rug out from under the value-add pre-sell affiliates driving buyers to their eCatlogs. By letting every cookie setting interloper, incenter, pop-up traffic pirate and cookie stuffer poach off the merchants domain & cart the above legit new customer generator got their commission potential cut down to the “I give Up” point.
How you going to guarantee their pre-sell value add traffic focusing effort gets rewarded via referral cookie tracking?? What reward is there for landing on the front page of http://www.Get-in2.com for the site owner to place customer facing creatives there from those network merchants? Just one merchant on that page will never fail to report one sale for every 20 clicks this month and every month for years to come. They have no interlopers or incent poachers interferring with the referred targeted customer’s buying process.
What are the odds the Lenovo ThinkPad Reserve Edition Notebook will get sold out before a sale leaks through the Linkshare/TigerDirect system without a stupid coupon attached and commission going elsewhere????
“Helping people buy what they want and demand is always the shortest way to marketing success and profits.”
I couldn’t agree more with you Ola and would like to add that it is not only the shortest way, but also the longest sustainable with the greatest user satisfaction and approval.
A marketer who people actually like to introduce to their friends, not like a stereo-type “life insurance sales man” who everybody at a class reunion tries to avoid talking to.
However, there is a catch, you have to start thinking about other people’s wants and needs and forget about your own for a moment. Marketers who use the “over-the-head” and questionable marketing approaches are usually thinking about their own needs and wants all the time instead.
Jeff one interesting question is will data portability allow a more relevant experience for users and their interaction with brands.This is a very interesting concept that plays into the new “Attention Economy”,
Great discussion thread Jeff as it triggered me into trying to see how to capture marketing/product buzz and use the buzz to capture a piece of a larger pie. I’ve always prized working with merchants who had “product passion” as that IS the sustaining ingredient once the consumer buzz dies down to a background sound.
Take the cosmetic & skincare industry. A crowded multi billion dollar slug fest of snake oil peddlers, buzz artists and well budgeted Adwhores. I heard the product buzz and passion surrounding the Revaleskin and powerful antioxidant CoffeeBerry. I bought a domain to try pushing skincare products through affiliate enabled merchants. There are a slew of them but none can devote web eCatalog space or time to develop any real buzz on a single product line.
So a half hearted effort to push some GoldenCan ‘Strawberrynet.com” displays, and the usual bottlenecks of building out some individual product links for Revaleskin through Greatskin, the Skin Store, MakeMeHeal.com where no merchant had a true product passion left http://www.PamperMySkin.com unnoticed at Google. Why even try to build it out if traffic would be a PPC effort and merchant landing pages a crap shoot as to reporting sales.
No Problem for me Jeff as I had product passion for Revaleskin originally to be sold via dermitologist/plastic surgeon prescription only office/spa sales. Well the limited marketplace setting fell apart quick so everyone is right there in Google hawking RevaleSkin sales. Whats an affiliate to do …. hawk RevaleSkin coupons or Merchant coupons as a point of sale cart poacher??
MY test last week was to build out PamperMySkin.com with my merchant satellite sales channel scheme. Get a simple secure cart and a stocking partner and bypass the affiliate white noise. See if I could get SERP listings and book sales before spending a dime on Adwords. Tall task for a one man shop who just happened to believe high octane Coffee was a miracle drink deserving to be in every doctor’s office nationwide…. period. Hey the good antioxidant free radical killers were in the discarded part of the coffee plant fruit.
The diluted sun baked part still causes buzz around any coffee pot worldwide. So up goes the eye candy and buzz inducing content with some simple freight free “buy now buttons”. Will the result get any Google Love and be able to compete against the skincare giants whacking each other with discounts rather then some CoffeeBerry buzz? Time will tell as the site is already booking sales and I don’t have any Web 2.0 conversations going yet as the web ink dries.
Wow. First 2 positions at Google for several buying keywords and the site isn’t a week old. I couldn’t get the skincare merchant giants to make individual links or even sell anything but the retail priced 3 product kit. Now they have ZERO links and I know every sale will be reported… LOL :>)
This is the future of affiliate value-added sales marketing. No multi-line merchant has the time or passion to buildout a product promotion site on a different domain. If the affiliate is willing then the merchants should jump start their PPC spend and offer up a shopping cart “buy now” button so Google treats them like a real merchant.