Posted by Here’s an old sales question for you:
Is it easier to sell one person one item for one million dollars, or to sell one million people something that costs one dollar?
It’s not a trick question and the logic goes that it’s much easier to sell one person something for one million dollars.
When it comes to the online world, I’d argue that it’s equal. Heck, it might even be easier to sell one million people something that costs one dollar.
That’s why eBay works, and that’s why Chris Anderson wrote the best-selling book, The Long Tail.
Business models simply don’t look the same to any of us anymore (and that goes for the music industry to the marketing industry and every other industry in between), because all markets look smaller in comparison to how businesses worked and were built before.
The truth is that they’re not smaller. Products seem much more targeted.
Here’s the challenge: don’t get sucked into the mass media mind-set when it comes to online.
If you know that you can reach your entire market of 100,000 potential customers, why would you worry about buying media on a CPM (Cost Per Thousand) basis?
Focus.
Focus on your target market. Focus on delivering them relevant content. And, most importantly, focus on advertising and communicating to them where they are, instead of where everyone (in the whole world) is.
The Digital Marketing channel offers you the ability and the channel to focus.
Harness it.
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What I think is quite amazing about digital marketing is that a new version of that same sales question can be:
Since we can easily sell an item for one dollar to a million people, how do we sell something for ten cents to half a billion people on the other side of the world?
Granted this is somewhat the opposite of focusing on a specific target, but it’s still an interesting twist that wasn’t even close to possible not so long ago.
Great points. Why pay to spam your message to a mostly unfiltered audience when you can target and only pay for action.
paying for “cost per action” (like only when somebody has clicked on your ad, gone the site, completed the form, and was accepted for your service) is so much more effective than CPM or even CPC