Buying Power has Shifted

The buying power has shifted and so should your website.  Gone are the days when you could get away with a static website or no website at all and do little advertising the old fashion way: placemats, radio, billboard, word of mouth.  Don’t get us wrong, you still want to do all of those methods of promotion, especially the word of mouth—we lived off just that for 13 years!  But times have changed, my friends.

In the past, let’s say about 10 years ago, the seller was definitely in control: brochures, diagrams, case studies, testimonials were all the rave.  Inside sales were order takers, outsides sales just pounded the streets, and if you had a website, it cost a huge amount of money to get it up and running, so businesses just relied on traditional methods of advertising. Twenty-year-olds were the ones with iPhones and able to slowly connect to the world wide web.

The buying power has simply shifted—to the buyer.  Take out the middleman.  The internet is social and interactive, not static and slow moving.  Buying power is simply at your fingertips, and that means the buying behavior has changed.  Consumers want their products when they want them/how they want them and it often doesn’t involve a salesperson.  It involves loads of content, resourced information pumping through the veins of your website. Education, good o’l fashion information, reviews, are what buyers want.  They don’t want to be sold too. Websites and forms of inbound marketing content (think inbox); such as podcasts, short video clips, blogs, and social media are all part of the buying game.  Is it overwhelming—hell yes!  But is it worth it, when you can click on a button and see how many users visited your site, that day, that week or even that month and pinpointed where the heaviest traffic filtered through? Definitely!  Is it exciting to see that when you send out an email campaign, you can directly identify what time someone read your email and how many times the clicked through your content?

To recap: update your website with mobile friendly information, engage with them through social media, and last but not least, track your results!  Your customer doesn’t have to be right around the corner, they can be just Facebook away!