The Challenge

Everything is communication, everything is commerce.

Published by Esteban Glas on December 1st, 2006 | This post lacks all category except for: Business, Marketing, Web, Web Marketing

The thin line dividing marketing and sales is gone. For good. When you talk about your company you are selling it, when you post a price or offer you are also communicating something.

A new mind set has be achieved in order to succeed on this “saleting” world. The most common error is to make everything “sales oriented” in a manner that is too obvious for the general public. There’s nothing more annoying than manifesto after manifesto of why you should buy our stuff. Let people figure the why themselves.

As David Churbuck points out in his “case of the Spy Cam” (By the way, David, have you ever considered using more “human” URLs on your blog?) when thinking about the impact of Design Matters’ entry on the spy cam:

blogging about a specific SKU we were able to plunge a spoke of traffic deep into Lenovo.com, bypassing usability and navigation architectures, bypassing change-requests

Point taken, a blog about design created quite a fuzz about a particular shop item which somewhat boosted sales. David further writes:

In retrospect, I blew it by not offering David’s audience a specific reason to buy one.

I happen to disagree on this one. I think pinpointing a reason to buy one on Design Matters would of backfired, for two main reasons. It would of been against the “spirit” of the blog (unless you decide to rename it “sales matter”), the second reason is that, as I mentioned, people dislike “badly disguised advertising”, and thus I’m almost sure the “viral” effect of that particular post would of been greatly diminished if it were “infected” by a notorious sales twist.

To speak about the other end of this post (sales) the commerce communications also speak strongly about a company’s policies and ideas (or ideals). The way products are displayed, the fashion in which everything is organized and even the pricing (and the way prices are displayed) communicate something to the users. A lot of care should be taken when designing sales pages. A misplaced price, image or spec might murder sales intentions. Bare in mind you are communicating a product, price and a reason to buy. Depending on the company’s strategy you might want to underline one over the others. Although pricing is important (as I mention at this post) it is not the only thing to display on a sales page. Bare in mind you are communicating to sale.

With all this being said, the aim for web production and content teams is to integrate marketing, merchandising and sales in a sole, comprehensive entity that takes into account all aspects, from marketing and brand awareness to pricing and product display. Wanted a challenge?

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