Internet marketing

When I was at the magazines, I'd often accompany our sales guys as they worked the floor at trade shows. We'd meet up with marketing directors from the various suppliers exhibiting and go into our song and dance about the magazine and its audience and its circulation. Eventually the discussion would wind around to our sales guy asking about the customer's plan for marketing in the upcoming period. Answers varied, but one thing I heard all the time was, "We are really only interested in online right now." I used to shove my hand in my pocket to prevent it from spontaneously darting out and smacking the supposed marketing expert in the forehead.

Marketing is the process of creating demand for your product. It means reaching out to people who haven't heard about it, or don't have all the information about it, or have the wrong impression about it, and giving them messages that will cause them to want it. It is different from sales, in that sales is about fulfilling demand. In its pure form, sales is only concerned with negotiating the transaction. Sales only happens once the customer has contacted you and expressed an interest in your product. Marketing is concerned with finding the customers and getting them to that point.

When it comes to sales, the internet is a fantastic tool. Once a customer knows he wants your product, there is no easier or cheaper way to meet his demand than to have him browse your website, get your pricing (without any ability to haggle), place his order and pay to have you ship it to him. From a sales perspective, a good website beats everything about a physical store except for the instant gratification element, which is actually pretty important. In my opinion, the only reason there are still physical stores selling things that could be shipped is because people do not want to wait to receive something they have paid for. I guess some people enjoy the activity of browsing in a store, so there is that element as well.

As a marketing tool, the internet is far less effective. The central problem is the self-directed nature of the user's experience. In old media, the user tuned into a channel and received whatever was being broadcast. He got the commercial you bought whether he wanted it or not and you automatically had at least some part of his attention. In terms of creating demand, this was genius. You could count on thousands of viewers seeing your message every time you ran it, whether they had ever heard of your company or not. All you had to do was attach your message to a source of content that had your desired audience's attention. Some of these same principles are at work on the internet; there are sites with content that attract users who could serve as a potential audience for your message. But internet users are much more focused on consuming only the content they want. There are sharp limitations on how much of a web page can be used for advertising without alienating users, and I think even that advertising is usually ignored as users focus in on finding just the content they want. TV viewers, radio listeners and print readers accept that their content consumption will be completely interrupted for short periods by an advertising message, and most of them don't mind. But interruptions to the flow of content on the internet are viewed as a highly irritating barriers to the use of the medium itself. As a wise man once said, "People often pick up a magazine to look at the ads. No one ever went to a website for the same reason."

So there's the issue. The internet is narrowcasting instead of broadcasting. Even within your target market group, many of the people you need to reach are not where your message is. You can't create demand unless you have eyes looking at your message, and the eyes on the internet are spread out over too many places. On a TV or radio channel, or in a magazine, the content is spread out over a period of time or a number of pages for people to take in sequentially. Audience participation can be measured in terms of time spent, during which time it receives whatever messages the broadcaster wants to give it. Internet participation is measured in terms of hits; people go straight to the content they want, then go somewhere else. A person consuming media the old way will see your message whether they are aware of you or not, which gives you a chance to create demand where there was none, or very little. A person consuming content on the internet will only see your message if he is purposefully looking for it, which means he already has demand for your product. In order for the internet to work for you, the demand has to be created somewhere else, leaving the internet to play its strongest role as a fulfiller of demand.