Roughly around 45% of Zero To Sixty Marketing clients don’t have an actual brick and mortar store to sell their items. Many of our clients offer services from office buildings where they have no intention of actually entertaining clients. Still others depend on event marketing to sell their wares to industry retailers and discriminating customers.
If you operate a business like these, without a storefront where buyers to come to you, making sure your products can be fully appreciated is a challenge. Tangible items may need to be felt, services need to be shown relevant and necessary, and conveying luxury is often the missing element when it comes to being able to convince upscale buyers to purchase.
Knowing how to sell your luxury item face-to-face isn’t the problem for smaller brands. The problem is that type of salesmanship has an ineffective ratio. It’s far better to harness the online environment, where your efforts can be multiplied to reach an unlimited number of customers.
How do you replicate the luxury, class, and ease-of-use to an online market? Especially when so many shopping online are looking for a discount and low-ball pricing?
No matter what your technical ability is at the moment, this year you’re going to have to stretch. It’s seriously that important. Video, audio, imagery, and social media avenues couldn’t be more effective than right now.
Equation Research conducted a study in November of 2011 over the last quarter viability of tablet, smartphone, e-reader, and PC purchase habits. With a reliability of +/- 3% accuracy, the results should change how American business owners think about their company growth for the future.
Tablet shoppers said they feel more fulfilled, happy, and inspired when shopping on tablets. They liked to linger; they liked the entire experience. And, they said they’d do it again in 2012. Smartphone shoppers didn’t particularly enjoy using apps, surprisingly, but liked the ease of following brands and sharing that Facebook offered. It was obvious, according to ZMags, that mobile devices drove 20-30% of revenue. Their upscale online magazine measured 5x-6x growth during Q4 2011.
29% of tablet and mobile users cited convenience as the #1 reason they purchased, and 24% said they enjoyed the entire ‘browsing’ experience.
Knowing these precursors to purchase, we should be getting real excited about how to convey our luxury and convenience items and services. It’s not going to be acceptable to offer these items in a poor light. Polish on marketing copy and design, while maintaining a conversational and approachable manner, are the new goals of the year.
My advice to you? Learn how to develop videos, audios, and images the right file size for the online environment, and use a service with a reputation for making the process easy. For audio and video, I use AudioAcrobat. I can count on easy streaming and mp3 download for my clients and subscribers, and my information can be shared easily. I like that. It’s really easy to learn, too.
If you use a WordPress website, start uploading product images to your media library. This will be a necessary step when we go forward learning how to use those images. They need to have an ‘online home,’ and your WordPress.org (not .com) is a great place to keep them to be used easily in the future.
Are you planning on being available to a mobile crowd? Leave me your comments below!
