In my experience as a marketing professional, I get to meet people with varied perspectives. Sometimes it makes me want to pull my hair when I meet people who have extreme viewpoints. Like a holidays company in Goldcoast which gets more than ten thousand unique visitors to its website and no enquiries and sales. This company has a monthly bill of twenty thousand dollars on telemarketing alone. They do not have an enquiry form on the website and don’t have any offers for online sales. The CEO believes that the website should only be used to profile the company. I can see the immediate opportunity to convert the traffic into enquiries but one has to cross a mental block before anything starts happening.
I believe that companies who rely heavily on cold calling should generate warm leads through the internet and then convert them into sales. With the internet penetration so high, there are a large number of people making searches online for both online and offline sales. Imagine a world where telecom companies move away from push based selling to pull based selling. Lesser time wasted getting offers we were not interested in, and more productive sales time for the companies.
We are moving to a world where people are feeling stressed by push sales. As a result, when a company markets itself in subtle, subliminal ways, it has a higher impact. Websites which engage there audience by providing them avenues for useful information and interaction become popular quickly. It is because people embrace concepts and like to identify with social groups. If a product or service is then offered as part of the ideology which the social group represents, it is embraced as well.
I met a company, which is marketing educational products to school students. They were relying heavily on direct marketing and telemarketing for there sales. I recommended to them that they create a forum for parents. Within this forum, we introduced a section on education. There website was then listed as a useful resource within this section.
I foresee subliminal marketing as gaining preeminence in time to come. However, it has to be combined with other initiatives like newsletter marketing to have a high impact. Opt-in newsletters will become a powerful marketing tool and businesses will use there websites to capture email addresses and engage with customers using permission based marketing.