Sometimes blogging can be the difference between making a sale and giving the sale to a competitor.
What do I mean?
I was talking to a client the other day who was moving from Pay Per Click marketing of his products into SEO and blogging. His widget is expensive so while the per click price is not up there with lawyers and loans, the sheer quantity it takes to make a sale works out just as expensive or even more. Their PPC budget is in the tens of thousands a month. With that kind of overhead, trying SEO and blogging is a no-brainer.
There are loads of markets where a similar strategy makes sense. A key reason is “customer education”
Educate to Sell
As Brian says, Teaching Sells. In any market where the customer needs to be educated in order to sell to them, anyone who uses “Advert to Sales page” as an approach is going to lose a lot of sales. That is because 90% of your audience is not ready to buy (yet).
Flip that around though, what do bloggers do best? Produce engaging content!
Educating customers is good for bloggers, bad for advertising-only companies
If you talk to the people at these companies they tell you they want more sales but customers aren’t ready to buy. They increase their brand advertising spend, optimize their adwords campaigns. Basically fix what isn’t broken.
There are a series of books by a brilliant guy called Dr Goldratt (makes me think of a James Bond character!), who invented the “Theory of Constraints“. This idea basically tells you to find the constraint in a system and prioritize it. In our scenario here, the customers knowledge is the constraint, not the advertising.
Sales Education Cycle
Take the simplistic example of Digital Photography. You start not being aware of very much about the topic, but you might hear or see something that makes you interested. It could be an ad, a friend, newspaper mention, could be anything. At this point you are aware, moving toward interested.
The more you learn, the more interested you get, so you do some research. You buy magazines, look online, read reviews. Adverts will interest you more but they are not going to get you to extract your credit card until you are good and ready.
Only when you have done your research (models, brands, complexity, learning curve, capability, price, and so on) will you buy, but even then you will research where to buy.
That adwords ad is looking less effective now, isn’t it? Adwords are great, but if you are using them to make a direct sale, they only work for a specific part of the buying cycle and only when paired up with the “buying” keywords. Comparator sites can be as effective if competing on price.
It doesn’t end there, as anyone who has become addicted to photography will tell you. You have bought your camera but there is a whole world of photography related purchases. As you learn your camera you find you need to upgrade, or you want a new lens (or 10), a flash, tripod, bag, various other widgets and do-dads. Yup, the cycle starts all over again. You are not the same customer before, it is an entirely new cycle of education to purchase.
Blogs, or at least content, fit in very well into this model. It could be gardening, cigar reviews, business to business, many markets need to be educated before they will buy.
Blog to Educate and Inform
Teach customers what they need to know and you build trust and loyalty. Bring them along on their journey, show them they can rely on you to steer them right.
Does it really work? Put it this way, I and my friends have spent a few thousand dollars through the Strobist affiliate links. One company seems to realize the value in the content and are advertising that they stock what David recommends. I imagine they get better sales for a much lower cost than had they tried the PPC route.