Web Marketing – Opportunity or Oxymoron

By: Norm MacLeod

If there was a movie about Web marketing it would probably be called A Shot In the Dark and the same words Inspector Clouseau used to sum up the original movie, “I believe everything, I believe nothing,” would also aptly apply.

 In the Office Products world, web marketing used to mean a number of boxed ads for randomly selected products spread around the landing page. These ads were funded by vendors usually out of the same pot that pays for flyers and catalogues. And was there a return on this investment?

You can choose either:

A) YES - 102,816 impressions over the month the ad appeared

B) NO - 14 clicks and possibly 3 sales actually attributable to the ad.  

 
Of course web marketing has evolved since then. Now we have stalker ads and search based personalized ads that are at least somewhat relevant to the customer. What’s that you say, you don’t really care that a Staples ad appears on Kijiji after you’ve been to their site and didn’t find either the item or price you were looking for? Rather than copying current fashionable ways of spending web dollars, perhaps our industry needs to concentrate more on finding marketing tools that genuinely benefit our particular breed of web customer.

For better or worse, our industry’s products really aren’t that emotionally important to our customers and ads for them will never be of much interest to anyone other than someone with that exact burning need the moment the ad is seen. So does that mean web marketing is a waste of money?

Based on the fact that the telemarketing industry still exists by trying to sell duct cleaning to everyone in the world with a land based phone, the shotgun approach must deliver some small percentage of success. But is there a way to turn web marketing funds into a higher percentage form of campaign, preferably one that is not annoying or intrusive to the customer? I believe the answer is a resounding YES.

The most effective use of Web marketing funds is to help the customer find what they are looking for even if they aren’t quite sure what that exactly is. Why is this the most effective spend? Because the decision about what to buy has not been made yet. People searching specifically, knowing what they want or shopping from a contract/favourites list, can’t be easily influenced. The decision making is already done. 

Imagine yourself as a customer shopping for an item. You know roughly what you want, be it a pen or a USB drive or a binder but you aren’t sure about brand or feature set. You enter the general item name into the search field and a scroll down of choices appears. At this point, it can either be eenie-meenie pick one at random or if some web marketing dollars have been allocated, specific products can be made more appealing.

For example, one of the items in the list could have a 30% off sale sign, or a $10 off coupon or a banner saying Customer Top Choice or ECO Choice. Another very simple and cheap approach is to make the item photo of the most profitable product more attractive than the ones around it, either bigger or with a more colourful background. A useful attention getter is a click for video demo icon or detailed fact sheet. The key at this point is to help the customer make a buying decision (even if it is on a paid for basis). At the very least, the search sequence should be based on some internal rationale, whether that is coop funding driven or dealer profitability driven.

So how do the big 3 industry web sites stack up? Totally at random, I selected the category of Retractable gel pens for a search, and here’s what I found on October 16^th, 11:30AM:

None of the sites attempted any direct marketing once the scroll down appeared, one site actually had no discernible sequence logic at all and included products that weren’t even in the selected category (a refill is NOT a pen). The other 2 sites had returns that were likely based on sales ranking as well as a directive to place private brand high in the list.

You would think that at least a boxed ad could appear relevant to the product group selected since all 3 of these sites run timed promotions which would usually have some product on sale in the selected category. It’s already on sale, how about letting the web customer know it up front rather than having to specifically sort by On Sale. How many vendors have tried to influence the sequence of the product scroll down, realizing that most customers aren’t going to get past about #10? How many vendors have demanded that when they coop for a promotion, the save amount be highlighted on the web search? How many vendors have proposed an aggressive cross sell campaign to dealers funding a switch over special offer if their product is not the first selected? How many vendors pay to ensure their collateral materials are used properly on the web site?

All of these web marketing tactics are well within the capabilities of the industry web sites. Dealers need to allocate more resources to their web activities, moving away from things like catalogues and flyers, to make them happen and if the dealers aren’t going to do it on their own, the vendors need to drive the process and ensure their marketing dollars are spent effectively. Otherwise, start buying shares in Amazon.

 

Norm MacLeod has been a Marketing / Merchandising executive in the Office Products channel for over 30 years. At the dealer level, with Willson Stationers, Compucentre and most recently Basics Office Products and at the vendor level with Blueline Inc. Currently in a semi-retired state as a photographer at large and special projects gun-for-hire for the Basics Dealer group.

         He can be reached at: nwmac123@gmail.com