A question posed to me by one of my chat mates. To answer that question, you need to know the chat we had before the question.
He: Hi Anand
Me: Hi
He: So, what do you do?
Me: I am into Internet Marketing
He: So, you are a liar?
Reminded me of the popular book by Seth Godin and a similarly popular proverb in my home state. In this age where the people have been empowered with search engines, decision engines and more engines than I can think of, do marketers and salesmen have any role to play?
Marketing as any other industry has evolved from the days of the print to the current days of the internet. It is time popular offline marketers and marketing companies sit up on their conference tables and redesign their approach.
From the days where marketing just involved buying adspace on popular newspapers and televisions to the current days of marketing which has branched out into “Relationship Marketing”, “Inbound Marketing” and many much more.
Internet Marketing and my area of interest and specialization, has more to do about engaging with the customers and collecting feedback about the products and services offered by our clients than hard selling. From what I believe, traditional marketing are:
You have a product.
You put a salesman in a busy junction.
He shoves the product into everyones face.
For every 100 people he “attacks”, maybe 2 people will buy. End of cycle.
For every 2 people who might buy, you are:
Pissing off 40 people by interruption marketing
Being ignored by another 40.
Building awareness with the rest.
Is it really worth the 2 sales you might make?
Internet Marketing is more about building a community of those who might be interested in your services sometime in the future. If you sell jewellery, your clients are just about every woman out there! Build a blog, build a fan base around your product and then when they are ready to buy, I am pretty sure your brand will be the first thing on their mind. Be Remarkable.
Talk marketing to the people who are interested in hearing you out. Do you sell you everyone out there?
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