Analysis Of A Sale Part 2

Analysis Of A Sale Part 2

Following my “Analysis of a Sale Part 1″ as linked to below,  here I present to you Part 2 of my Analysis of a Sale.

Sales: Offline and Internet Advertising

I had to be in the hospital today to accompany someone who needed a treatment. As I was sitting in the waiting room, I noticed that next to the elevators, on the wall, were “banner advertisements” trying to make sales. They were rectangular advertisements like our internet advertising on the web page. There were four of them, one under the other.

One was for private bedside accompaniment, which is a level less then private nursing care, someone who will stay by the patient in order to help take care of his needs, like someone in the family would do. Another one was for natural freshly prepared (healthy) fruit juices, available in the hospital at such and such a place. Another one was for television rental. The fourth was for a tourist agency.

I was struck, the first three make sense, they speak to the people who are in the waiting room, either to the patients or to those that accompany them. But the fourth one, what in the world is a tourist agency advertising in a hospital?!? Who is their target market, and what exactly are they trying to sell? Maybe it is self evident to those who need the service, the truth is that later in the day I saw at a different place in the hospital a travel agency advertising trips to healing mineral springs. But it certainly wasn’t obvious to me when I saw it.

I was amazed at how poor the placement of the advertisement was. The principles of offline and internet advertising are identical in the sense that you have to bring your offer before your target audience. But if you miss, if you bring your message before a different audience, then both in offline and internet advertising it’s a waste, and you’re not going to make any sales.

Sales: Marketing Ideas

In my previous post, Analysis of a Sale, I gave a basic outline of the building blocks which a person has to keep in mind when developing marketing ideas for sales. I emphasized that which is obvious, that there must be contact made between the buyer and the seller in order for a sale to be made, and this is central to all marketing ideas. And then I explained briefly the concepts of Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing, and the need to have credibility and develop authority.

In Push Marketing you find or develop an audience to whom you may offer your goods.

In Pull Marketing you position yourself so that people who are looking for what you have to sell will find you.

In the spirit of the introduction of my previous post I will make my words unfairly simple in order to focus in straight to the point.

We are speaking now about Pull Marketing ideas. There are two places where you can find people today, they are not the only places, but if you can conquer those two places you will be in very good shape. One is Search Engines (Google for example), and the second is Social Marketing sites (Twitter and Facebook for example). Many people, maybe the majority of the 1.7 billion people who use the internet, frequent on these sites as part of their internet activity. On Google they search for things, on Facebook they socialize, and they search as a part of their socializing, and on Twitter they do all kind of things, including a lot of searching.

Sales: Search Engine Marketing

I want to take them one by one, and to start with Google. People use Google (or Yahoo or Bing, etc.) for convenience in order to search for something. They perform searches in order to assist in whatever activity they may be doing on the internet. They may be searching for information, topic research or price comparision or weather or transportation and so forth, or for entertainment, or to buy a product. Whatever you can use the internet for, the search engines can help you.

The seller who wants to make sales on the internet needs to do a proper market evaluation, whether there is indeed a market for the item, that people actually buy the item. For example, items that people can get for free they usually won’t pay money for. And then who are the people that buy such an item, what sectors of the population, from what countries, what languages do they speak … in order, amongst other things, to arrive at the classic Search Engine marketing question, what do they type in to Google when they search in order to purchase your item.

Let’s say that you sell pink hamsters. You determine that people do indeed buy pink hamsters, and the main keyword that they type in to Google is “pink hamsters”. Now, the strategy is to do whatever it takes in order that when someone types in to Google pink hamsters that a link to your site comes up on the page.

Basically this Search Engine marketing strategy splits itself up into two possibilities. Either you buy your way in to the right side of the Google page, the PPC (pay per click) “Google Adwords”, or you get indexed by Google with a ranking such that you will appear on the (left side of the) first page. And given that the default Google settings are that ten links appear on the first page, that means that you have to get to the “Google Top Ten”. Now, to reach the second page is also something – for a certain percentage of searches, the person makes it to the second page, but not usually. If you are ranked only past the second page, more than position 20, it is unlikely that you will be getting serious traffic from the search engine.

Now, getting indexed on the Google top ten of a particular keyword is either a matter of luck, or alternatively of strategy, the strategy of SEO, search engine optimization. Luck exists, but it is not something that you can rely upon on a steady basis. SEO is more quantifiably measurable.

In order to reach the top ten with SEO can be done in two ways: 1) Classic SEO, where you either learn, or you have someone do for you, on-site optimization, by making your site “Google efficient”, and off-site optimization, the strategy of getting incoming links from outside sources. It is not uncommon that people pay thousands of dollars a month in order to have an SEO firm get them a good Google ranking. Or 2) to buy a good script which does close to the same thing. It depends on what your needs are. To reach the top ten on the keyword “television” obviously requires more expertise than on the keyword “pink hamsters”.

To be continued …

Boruch Rappaport

Tags: Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing, Marketing Ideas, Sales, Search Engine Marketing

This entry was posted on December 27, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Boruch Rappaport, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.