Marketing Articles About Inventory Search Results
- Gorilla Nation Hitches Ride on Thomas the Tank Engine. HiT Entertainment has selected GNKids, the kiddie-brand arm of Gorilla Nation, to sell ad inventory for its websites in North America and Australia.
Sites in the deal include ThomasandFriends.com,...
(08/27/08 09:00 PM)
- Google Ad Manager Goes Live. Google Ad Manager, which has been in beta since March, made its public debut today.
Ad Manager is a hosted ad serving and management service for small business publishers. It helps prepare inventory...
(08/26/08 09:01 AM)
- #1 Lesson from 2007: Using a Sense of Urgency in Marketing.
If there's one theme that keeps coming back to me from the past year, it's got the be the proper use (and the ease of misuse, if you're not careful) of a sense of urgency about doing business with you and your company. I'm not talking about the cheezy 'limited time offers' that you see over and over on TV (limited my ass...you mean, limited by your budget for spewing out shitty ads...) but genuine urgency created by inflection points in your business which moves the needle on buyer behavior.
Keep in mind here that I'm talking mostly about B2B, which, from my perspective, makes this even more exciting. B2C gets all the urgency in the mass media, and sometimes it's a rare day for most B2B organizations to be able to substantiate a genuine sense of urgency within the base of prospects.
That said, urgency is not for everyone. It's a powerful weapon that's not to be used without forethought and and crisp and clear understanding of not only the immediate implications, but also future consequences of the slippery slope that it can create, as discussed in a concise little bit about urgency in the Marketing Experiments blog.
So, what's this urgency thing all about and how do you create it?
I guess that this will be different for everyone, but frankly, the most successful levers that I've found are timing around pricing and production and availability, quotas and caps. I'm keen to hear more about what you think. Again, I'm talking sustainable things here - not just a 50% off sale or something....
Timing and production to create urgency:
This is the fun one. A great example is an impending price increase. If you've been doing a great deal of lead nurturing with your base of prospects, this is especially useful because the already know and trust you. On the other hand, if you don't have a base of prospects that you're nurturing, then you're just another average dude with a deal. Seriously, there's a lot of you out there...this type of urgency play almost has to come from a position of trust to be truly effective. Sure, you can impose urgency on a facelist list of prospects, but your conversion will suffer.
Proper planning improves urgency results:
Again, you can take this for what it's worth, but like everything I preach about when I talk about thought leadership marketing or 'altruism before capitalism', you can't just wake up one day and say "I need to create a sense of urgency and get more sales." Crap, what's first. Wrong way Charlie. Not going to work. You need to plan this. You need to understand what the next inflection point in your business will be (obsolescence of an old product, price increase across the board, new product design coming out, office move/clearing inventory...something that's almost 'external' to you yet internal at the same time) and work in a sense of urgency into your marketing to coincide with (or, preferably leading up to) the genuine, non "manufactured" inflection point.
Quotas, caps and limited availability:
Take a page from event marketers (if any of you are attending sold out football games as we near playoff time, you understand the acute sense of urgency that surrounds ticket prices and the limited availability in stadium seating) and keep an eye on your quota for items, or your geographical territories that are quickly filling up or the number of 'limited edition' items that you can produce in one quarter. From a services perspective, such as social media speaking or marketing consulting (things which I have some familiarity with) the best creator of urgency is the calendar and the limited number of dates you have available.
This is not the end of the story. There's so much more to this urgency thing (like neuromarketing and buyer behavior) but for now, that's enough.
Action Items:What ideas do you have for creating urgency? Please share in comments!
(12/31/07 09:00 PM)
- Links for 2007-07-27 [del.icio.us].
- Online Publishers Need To Stop Selling Space » Publishing 2.0
They need to start selling scarcity. And, online, ad inventory is infinite. - Twitter | Union Square Ventures:
Fred Wilson, the VC behind del.icio.us, explains why he is puting money into Twitter—on the Web, communications platforms are good bets. - Microsoft Offers a Web-Based Strategy - New York Times
Microsoft says It will respond to the Webtop threat. We're still waiting.
- Online Publishers Need To Stop Selling Space » Publishing 2.0
