Online promotion - a spherical horse in a vacuum or why it does not work

It so happened that with varying success I have been promoting on the Internet for almost 5 years now. I do not consider myself to be a sufficiently qualified or experienced enough specialist to have something to share with respected colleagues in the workshop. Many articles and books have already been written on this topic, and every year there are more and more of them. This, of course, is wonderful, but in most of the materials on the topic of promotion on the Internet I do not like one well-known assumption.

Prelude

All of them describe the situation in the general case or as in the well-known joke about a spherical horse in a vacuum , while in reality everything goes sideways quite differently. Under the cut, I will try to simply enumerate how Internet marketing differs in practice from this “ideal model”, which is so easily and naturally drawn in our imagination.

The game is called "find ten differences." We call our imagination “Spherical horse in a vacuum”, and the harsh reality we denote by the question “Why does it not work?”. And it, as you probably already guessed, does not work in 90% of cases. And that means exactly that 90% of the time we spent on education and self-education is wasted.
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1. Scale - what works for $ 300,000, does not work for $ 300

The last event, in which I had the opportunity to participate, was devoted to promoting small business on the Internet. Two exceptionally revealing files happened to the speakers at once. Of course, the representatives of those very sharashinyh offices that successfully merge master 90% of the marketing budgets of small and medium-sized businesses. The audience was no more than 50 people. These were entrepreneurs, PR specialists, marketers and advertisers from small companies. After 10 minutes of the first lecture, the first third of the audience went out, after the second one - the second third. The remaining waited free coffee cakes and with an abstract view studied the landscape outside the window.

Why? Because these two lecturers have built their speeches on examples from advertising campaigns of brands such as Intel, Microsoft, Nissan and LUKOIL. These were excellent examples, but they are completely useless for grocery dealers, restaurants and cafes, freight companies, warehouse owners, recruitment agencies, etc. ... Why? Because all these companies are engaged in marketing in one and a half diggers along with the director, and for everything about everything they have a maximum of 1K $. Do you think it is useful for them to know how LUKOIL distributes its millions of advertising budgets between image, social and commercial advertising? Not. They are interested to know how to use their 30,000 rubles wisely ...

Spherical horse in a vacuum: Let's spend a million on contextual advertising. With a projected average for the CTR campaign - 1%, conversion - 1%, cost per click - $ 0.33, the cost of attracting a client will be about $ 30, and we will get a thousand new customers!

Why it does not work: because there is nowhere to take a million, and advertising campaigns with a budget of less than 10,000 rubles. uninteresting to professionals. Safely drain their first 10 000 rubles. on “try direct”, the entrepreneur decides that this does not suit him or does not work specifically for his business. Of course, in 99% of cases this is not the case.

2. Quality is a myth for buyers.

When the question of how best to advertise or promote a product or service is being considered, in 10 cases out of 10 this service or “default” product seems to be good, that is, relevant to the client’s requirements and having an adequate price. But why would it happen like that all by itself? Why then are customers and buyers so often dissatisfied with the quality of goods and services?

I, too, have no luck: almost everything that I had to advertise and promote online was a “bad” product, objectively a “bad” one. And more and more customers, who were so hard to get from the Internet by hook or by crook, were convinced of this in their own skin. And people, as is known, as far as possible, try not to step twice on the same rake. Word of mouth, too, has not been canceled. In B2B, this is generally a problem: there is no time for producing manure for halvah.

Spherical horse in vacuum: In our online store, half of the range is in stock, delivery is carried out by our own couriers, goods are always delivered on time, input prices allow you to keep 20% or even 30% mark-up. Every new customer is satisfied.

Why it does not work: because there is no place to take a warehouse and money for commodity balances, having received a client, you have to order the goods God knows where, or even from competitors in general, couriers from the delivery service constantly confuse addresses and dates, mark-ups are cheap. Customers curse the day they decided to contact us.

3. New customers. New customers.

All obsessed with new customers. The only task that is described in sufficient detail in the “ideal model” of Internet marketing is the search for new customers or, as we like to put it, expansion of the client base. And what's the use of thousands of visitors and hundreds of incoming calls, if they cannot earn money on them or, even worse, customers remain dissatisfied after the transaction.

1C is very correctly called one important module: "customer relationship management." In a situation like “a spherical horse in a vacuum,” the only task in this management is to find these very clients, and everything else happens as if by itself. In fact, analytics, loyalty, returns, customer quality, etc., are no less important ... Internet technologies make it possible to manage customer relationships much more efficiently than most companies do now. Much less is said and written about how and what to do with a client AFTER the first transaction than about how to attract him.

A spherical horse in a vacuum: The client finds himself in the networks that you insidiously set up, you get his contacts or a direct incoming call, and this is where your work ends. And the client alone decides that the next time he will come to you again.

Why it does not work: After attracting a client, work is just beginning. And it begins exactly that part of it, which is decisive. It determines how much you can earn on this client. As practice shows, this is much more important than the number of hot calls in the reports for the authorities. In practice, no work is done with the client after the first transaction. The next time you have to spend on attracting as many resources as it does on a new one.

4. Competitors are always better.

There is such a myth that when working with a certain product you always have a head start over competitors. Scientifically, this is called competitive advantage. It is strange that there is no opposite concept, such as “competitive disadvantages”. I, for example, come across them more often than with advantages. At the same time, in smart books, as a rule, the question of how to properly convey information to the client about “competitive advantages” is considered. At that time, as in practice, these competitive advantages have to do nothing but invent, while trying not to lie very much. Or, at least, to lie so that then no one could poke your nose at your own lies.

Competitors are always and everywhere. And there is no reason to hope that they are dumber than us. Every sales manager in any company should bounce off the answer to the question “What are you better than competitors?”. The fact of the matter is that in the personal communication of the sales person with the client, it is more difficult for the client to “jump off”. Remember: when they call you and offer to buy something, it is much more difficult to hang up than to close the browser page. Sometimes this is simply due to politeness, sometimes because of interest in other possible offers, or even because of the natural charm of the caller. In any case, undercooked noodles on the topic “What are we better than competitors”, which hangs on the customer’s ears on the phone, absolutely do not want to hang on the same ears, but from the pages of the site.

Spherical horse in a vacuum: you correctly and correctly present to the client a unique selling proposition, which he simply cannot resist. Since the offers of competitors are much less profitable for the client, he has no other options but to use your offer.

Why it doesn’t work: you correctly and beautifully present to the client the sales proposal invented by you the night before, with a half in half meeting the requirements of the market and the level of competitors. Even if a client bites and calls or places an order online, very soon the air lock, which you so diligently and inspiringly built in his head, will collapse like a house of cards. And it will irrevocably go to competitors, whose offer is objectively more profitable and, more importantly, more realistic than yours.

5. If advertising on the Internet is not needed at all

In the literature on our topic is never considered a situation where advertising on the Internet is simply useless for the company. Meanwhile, the promotion on the Internet really need not all. This may be due to the difficulty of finding the target audience or the specifics of the company's business itself. I agree that this is not the most popular point of view. But I made this conclusion only from personal experience.

There are, it turns out, in this world, the owners of small warehouses, transport companies, suppliers of highly specialized equipment and materials, and many other companies that for all their existence will have no more than a dozen contractors and no longer need them. And from the Internet they also do not need anything, except for e-mail, and even without it you can get by if everything can be solved by phone.

Do you think they are stuck in the last century, they have no prospects, or are they just narrow-minded people? I do not think so. If only because they quite successfully run their business, and idiots rarely do it. The thing is, they are more concerned with other issues. For example, vehicle fleet maintenance, expansion of warehouse space, improvement of product quality - such questions can be as many as you want, and in some business they can be, indeed, more important than advertising, marketing, PR and the entire Internet combined.

Instead of conclusion

It is fun to watch as representatives of such companies unsuccessfully try to “push” their services to web-studios and advertising agencies. If the latter had bothered to understand the business of their future client, it would be clear to them, like a day, that all their attempts with a high probability would remain unsuccessful. But, unfortunately, they do not always bother themselves with this. And in vain - would save a lot of time.

No matter how many clever and correct things we recognize, in each specific case it is necessary, first of all, to turn on the head and act on the situation. But just with this, our brother has problems. Acting on well-known, run-in templates, of course, is much easier than understanding the details. But sample solutions, as it turns out, really work only in the well-known example with a spherical horse in a vacuum.