Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Marketing

How do you value brand and reputation?

Here’s a question for all the folks who say that brand and reputation are important. How do you value brand? How do you value reputation? How do you know when your efforts at branding and reputation are paying off?

This is something that folks who are community managers like Amber Naslund and DJ Waldow struggle with daily. What value do companies need to put on their efforts?

Here’s a relatively simple (and remember, simple != easy) way to get started in measuring the impact of brand in financial terms, in hard numbers that you can wrap your head around.

First, you need to know the value of a lead that you generate through marketing. Let’s say you have a product like World of Warcraft that costs $15/month. The annual value of that customer is$ 15 x 12 months, or $180.$

Cut that180 by your retention rate annually. If 90% of your customers remain loyal for a year, then a lead is worth 90% of $180 or$ 162.

Now cut that by your sales conversion rate. Let’s say that of every lead that walks in the door, 10% become customers. A lead, then, is worth $162 x 10%, or$ 16.20.

On your web site, go plug this into Google Analytics under Goal Settings.

Now, assuming you’ve got Goals configured correctly, every time someone becomes a lead via your web site, you assign their conversion a value of $16.20. Analytics does a whole bunch of slicing and dicing to help you assign values to all the different pieces of your web site, too. We’ll discuss that another time.

Let’s set a baseline, then, for what brand and reputation mean. If you have a great brand and great reputation, people will look for you, yes? People will seek you out based on your brand and reputation and presumably be primed to buy from you if your brand and reputation are strong, right?

Head to Google Analytics’ Traffic Sources. Go to Keywords. Switch the view from the standard to your Goal Set. You should now see the search terms people used to find your web site along with the conversion rate and per visit Goal Value in your view. Look for your brand name:

Look especially at the difference between the generic search (line 1) and the brand name in terms of conversion rate and goal value. The brand here is worth 3x what the generic search term is worth.

Now click through to just that brand name keyword’s data, switch to the longest timeframe you have, adjust the settings to monthly view, and look at the macro trend. If your brand and reputation matter, if they are of value, then you should see increased conversions over time as more people seek out your brand, seek out your name, find your web site, and convert:

You can see that in this case, brand does matter. More people are getting to the example web site and converting, based on having searched out the brand name in a search engine. This is one way of judging the value of your brand and reputation – brand power makes people search for you, and reputation (and value perception) makes people convert.

Bear in mind this is a raw baseline for measuring the impact of your brand. We didn’t take into consideration people who just call up one of your sales staff or type your domain name in directly. What I’ve described above is more of a diagnostic snapshot of your brand than a whole, holistic view of your brand’s value – but it’s enough to get you started. It’s enough to give you a baseline on which you can make judgements about the effectiveness of your branding and reputation.

Make sure your community managers have access to your analytics so they can see for themselves the value of their efforts. If they’re truly boosting the value of your brand and reputation, you’ll be able to see it grow over time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, DJ’s doing a great job with Blue Sky Factory’s brand and reputation as an email marketing company. I can’t display our data because of NDA stuff, but the important lines are going in the right direction – up.

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March 11, 2010
What photography can teach you about marketing focus

Take a look at this photo of the coffee stand here at the office:

It’s bland. It’s boring. It tries to cram everything relevant into one picture so that customers don’t miss anything. It’s taken by someone who knows little to nothing about photographic composition, so it’s shot square on with no sense of depth, perspective, or anything. It is, in other words, a typical photo.

That photo is your standard, typical marketing campaign. This is what most marketing is – a long feature list of stuff, much of which may not even be helpful if you don’t already know what the product is. There’s no clear benefit to prospective customers, much of it is confusing, and because it’s so boring and bland to look at, your customers’ mental ad blocking software bounces your campaign out before they even get a chance to investigate.

Here’s the same coffee stand, the same location, with a slightly different look:

Look how much is missing. All of the extraneous features are gone from the photo. In place of “cram everything into one photo”, we see an intense focus from a radically different perspective. The lens blurs out all the details that aren’t really helpful anyway, and leaves just one or two things in focus. The change in perspective lets you see the coffee stand in a different perspective that you normally would, and makes for a more compelling photo.

This is what your marketing can become. Look at that photo. What’s the central focus – the features of the coffee stand and all the different things you can do at it? No. The central focus is the benefit to the prospective customer – a cup of coffee. The background hints at all your different options, but doesn’t overwhelm you with long lists of stuff.

What could your marketing become if you took away the endless feature lists, if you stripped down your campaigns to focus on just one benefit, if you went at that one benefit from a different perspective than what the committee of marketers usually comes up with? What if you took the risk of focusing only on what was essential – the benefit to the customer – and put away everything else?

It’s not easy, either in photography or in marketing, to take away until only the essence is left. It’s counterintuitive, especially when you have a great product or service that has tons of features and really cool aspects, to want to exclude most of them from the customer’s first look. The rewards, however, make it worthwhile – a much more compelling photo that draws in the eye, and a much more compelling marketing campaign that draws in the customer.

What will your focus be in your next marketing campaign? Whatever it is, I hope you take the risk, take your shot, and show the world just the essence of what you have to offer.

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March 10, 2010
Friday fun: what's on my iPod for productivity

It’s Friday. Let’s have a little bit of fun. One of the things that makes me productive during the workday? The right audio. Sometimes the audio is training, most of the time it’s good tunes. Here’s some of what’s on my iPod while the day is flying by. You’ll notice that for the most part, I avoid anything with words in it – instrumental rules the day for cognitive psychology reasons. Few people can effectively process more than one language stream at a time, so listening to words in a song can conflict with trying to write words on the page. Hence, most of the music is instrumental.

Full disclosure: Of course everything is affiliate-linked for commissions. Did you expect otherwise?

Music to work by

The Epic Score folks have some of the best music in iTunes for coding, drafting, and writing. If you need to boost your own sense of urgency, Action & Adventure is the recipe for you. If you need dramatic copy, Epic Drama fits the bill.

If you’re a Blizzard fan (i.e. Warcraft player) one of the best albums to get, hands down, is the Echoes of War symphonic set. Echoes of War are all the familiar Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo themes you know and love, arranged and performed by a full symphony orchestra.

Volume 1:

Volume 2:

The soundtrack to Wrath of the Lich King is pretty good by itself, btw.

Looking for something a little slower paced and different? The Tibetan Master Chants album with Lama Tashi puts karmically useful sounds in your head, as various sutras and mantras are chanted. If you like that chanting kind of background ambience, this will deliver.

Finally, if you need a hefty dose of heroism, John Ottman’s Superman Returns delivers.

Brain Food

If you’re in any kind of organization that sells something, I consider Tom Hopkins training to be Sales 101. Yeah, some of it comes across as cheesy, but for a novice salesperson who needs any kind of framework to start being minimally effective, Hopkins’ system is as good as any. Way back in the day when I was a technical recruiter, my firm sent me to his Boot Camp at the price of $3,750. Nowadays, you can get pretty much the same content for$ 18. Listen and learn.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around new media and social media still, there are very, very few books as good as Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. He narrates his own audiobook (which I view favorably – I’d rather hear the author unless they have a terribad voice) and it’s worth it if you don’t have the time to read the book.

Gear

There isn’t a day when I don’t use my Bose headphones. They’re awesome for travel, sure, especially on noisy airplanes, but they’re also awesome in the office for filtering out all the background crap that is subtly taking a toll on your brain via your ears. Air conditioning, fax machines, noisy coworkers and hallway conversations, laptop fans, all that ambient noise – it takes its toll. Using these headphones rocks, plain and simple. They’ll cost you an arm and a leg but if you do any kind of work that pays you more for more productivity (via bonuses, commissions, etc.) then these headphones will pay for themselves easily and quickly.

Hopefully this set of resources will help you squeeze more juice from your day too!

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March 5, 2010
Why you need calls to action in your blog posts

If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you’ve likely noticed these lovely buttons on the right:

You may also have noticed that there’s a deeply redundant piece at the bottom of every blog post:

I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, Chris, that’s redundant. And it’s redundant, too. Why do that? Do you think people are so blind or stupid that they don’t notice the obvious, user-experience focused, carefully placed call to action widget at the top of the page?

Not at all. Only very smart people read my blog. The stupid people are all at YouTube right now, watching endless selections of crotch kick videos and videos of kittens. No, the real reason I put that block of code at the end of every blog post despite its redundancy is simply this: my decor does not travel with my blog posts.

Exhibit one: Google Reader.

No part of my theme makes it into Google Reader. None of it. But that lovely block of redundant code makes it into Reader just fine. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, yes, but what’s the point? People are already subscribed to your blog if they’re reading it in Reader. That’s even more redundant!

That would indeed be the case except for one thing: the Share button built into reader that automatically shares the post – with subscription buttons – to the friends and followers of others. When the calls to action go with the post, they go into the Shared Items, too, for others to see and act on.

Exhibit two: Google Buzz.

Now we’re really getting into the thick of it. When you Buzz a blog post (or share it in Reader, which likely auto-buzzes it), you’re stripping the post of ANY context. Someone in Reader might think, hey, I’m reading someone else’s Shared Items, and since this is mostly blogs, this is probably a blog I can subscribe to. When you’re using Google Buzz, you’re sharing all kinds of stuff in there from many different sources. There’s no intuitive leap whatsoever to subscribe to items people are Buzzing…

… unless you embed the subscription calls to action right in your blog post, so they go with the Buzz, too.

So how do I do this? It’s stupid simple but manual. Make some nice buttons for yourself. If you’re too lazy to make buttons, use some of the Crystal Clear icons from Wikimedia. They’re free. Then just code up some really simple HTML and store it in a text file on your computer. If you’re more sophisticated, use macro software like TextExpander for the Mac or Texter for the PC and wire in that block of code so that when you’re done with a blog post, you just hit your macro and it auto-pastes the code right in for you:

I just type çß?† into the blog post and bam! Instant block of code that’s ready to deliver calls to action wherever this post ends up.

Do you have to do this? Not at all. But if your work is getting any distribution in things like Buzz, Google Reader, Feedburner, etc., then people are consuming your content without having any way to get back to you and sign up for more. That’s your loss and their loss, too. Putting together a simple block of HTML for every blog post with a few buttons takes just a few minutes, and it can help you build your audience every time someone shares your material. Try it!

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March 4, 2010
How to tell if you are a doomed marketer
Once upon a time, marketing was just marketing. It was a fabulous era of big brands, big launches, big parties. Martinis were de rigueur, agencies ruled the world, and three piece suits (that looked MAHHH-velous) were the signs of the professional marketer.

Once upon a time, technology was just technology. If you were in IT or development, you slung code all day, making the cool new thing (whether or not anyone wanted it). You plugged your earbuds in, cranked your music to 11, and reformatted servers, made objects and classes, hit up the LAN parties, and stared into the Matrix.

Along the way to today, something funny happened. The very best technology became marketing. Social networks suddenly transformed from cool technologies to cool marketing tools, and the reach of marketers went from whatever the ad spend budget was to whatever they have that was worth paying attention to. The very best marketing became technology. Brand mindshare became followers, fans, and friends. Direct mail became email marketing, which in turn fueled social marketing.

So here we are. Marketing is technology is marketing. It’s a crazy new world where someone like me with an MS in information systems who has never set foot in a marketing class is suddenly a professor of marketing at a reputable university because marketing is technology, technology is marketing. It’s a crazy world where the first ubernerd becomes the richest man on the planet and his successors start stupid picture-based web sites in college that turn into the largest communications platform in the world.

What does this mean for you? Here’s how to tell if your company is going to thrive or be doomed in the next few years.
- If marketing and technology aren’t having lunch together once a week, you’re doomed.
- If marketing and technology aren’t working together all the time, you’re doomed.
- If marketing has no technology capabilities and technology has no marketing focus, you’re doomed.
- If you as a marketer don’t know at least a high-level explanation of these three marketing-related technology terms, you’re doomed: FQL, SEO, API. Bonus points if you know what federated identity is and what it means for the future.
At my previous company, the Student Loan Network (the best student loan company) business thrived even in a hostile, highly competitive environment because marketing and technology were often one and the same. This gave an incredible competitive advantage over slower moving, slower thinking competitors.

At my current company, Blue Sky Factory (the best email marketing company), marketing suddenly has more technology capabilities, and it shows. While the specific detailed numbers are under NDA, newly-aligned marketing and technology initiatives have boosted marketing’s lead generation results by over 3,000% year-to-date. (there may eventually be a case study on this, though!)

Marketers, especially social media marketers, like to say that content is king, content is everything, and that’s partly true. Great products, great services, great content are vital to the long term success of your business. However, even the best content is useless if you don’t have the platforms and technologies in place to distribute them. Put another way, you might have the best pizza in the world, but if you have a drunk, highly unreliable delivery guy, your customers may never know about your pizza because it’ll never get to them.

As I’ve said many times on Marketing Over Coffee (the best marketing podcast), the way to get started fixing things, regardless of where you are in the corporate hierarchy, is to find someone in technology – at your company, preferably – and start having lunch with them once a week. Find out what those technology terms mean. Find out what technology is capable of, because once you know, your ability to market using technology will give you an incredible advantage over everyone else in your vertical space.

Plus, technology folks like lunch. Believe me, I know.

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March 2, 2010
How do you know where to pay per click?

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a great way to juice up a campaign in the short term. It’s also a really great way to lose a metric crapton of money in a hurry if you don’t know what you’re doing, especially if you’re a small, local business with a limited budget. Let’s look at one very small sliver of the PPC world and how to make more of the few advertising dollars you have.

This is Google’s AdWords PPC manager. Virtually everyone who has dabbled in PPC has seen this.

Look carefully in campaign settings, locations. You can edit this. Clicking edit brings up… Google Maps. Now here’s where it gets cool. You can draw right on the map the area you want your ads shown in.

Nifty, eh? If you know, for example, what ZIP codes around you have the demographic you want, you don’t have to spend money elsewhere. You can just draw out exactly the audience segments you want to attract.

How do you know what ZIP codes contain your demographics? Use the US Census Bureau Fact Finder. It’s free. What if you’re doing B2B instead of B2C? No problem! The Census Bureau also provides local business information in aggregate at its ZIP Business Patterns Index, also for free. Figure out who has your industries that you’re targeting.

Now, let’s say you want to kick it up another notch. What if you knew where interest already was? What if you could tell where interested people already lived? Wouldn’t that make your hyperlocal PPC advertising even more potent?

Lucky for you, you can do that, also for free. Sign up, register, and get plugged into Google’s Local Business Center. Once your listing is updated and is collecting data, you’ll get a nice dashboard of times your local business listing has appeared in Maps and local search. Even more powerful, though, is a nice map of where potential customers are requesting driving directions from:

Get it?

Take your local business center driving directions map and draw a big ol’ irregular polygon over that area in Google AdWords. You’re now targeting the geographic areas that people have already expressed interest in! This is incredibly powerful and just requires you to get your local business center listing up to scratch.

Maps. Local business center demographics. Census Bureau data. Adwords PPC. By binding all of these tools together, you can utterly crush your opponents or drive them out of business just on advertising costs alone. They’ll be spending like crazy in an unfocused way while you’ll be cherry-picking the best potential prospects. Try it!

Pro tip: make sure you bind your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account so that PPC cost data is passed through. That’s a topic for another time, though.

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February 25, 2010
Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words
Ever notice the giant pile of social media “experts” who don’t have two nickels to rub together? Ever wonder why?

They spend a hell of a lot more time talking than listening.

They labor under the mistaken belief that the more you talk, the more money you’ll make as a social media expert, and I suppose as long as you’re good at duping the gullible, that’s true until the market is tapped out. Once the suckers have been skimmed, though, they have to move on to find the next big thing to latch onto. (just wait for the Google Buzz experts!)

For the rest of us, for the folks who actually want to do a sustainable business in social media, the secret is listening. Not a big secret in and of itself, but the bigger, less-asked question is “What do you listen for?”

A lot of companies are doing defensive listening. They listen for things like “XYZ Company SUCKS” and other brand mentions. This is a good start, a good entry point for retention and reputation protection. However, this is only a start.

The second tier of folks, the community engagement folks, listen for things like industry jargon. In financial aid, for example, the word FAFSA is a buzzword of the industry. No one goes to a bar on Friday night and chats up the attractive person of their choice with, “Hey, have you seen my FAFSA results?”. That never happens. Community engagers build reputation and presence of mind by participating in conversations, honing in on the right conversations to participate in using the buzzwords and inside jargon of the industry.

The third tier of folks, the folks who want to do business and make money in social media listen for intent.

Sound familiar? That’s what made search marketing so revolutionary a decade ago. Search was a red flag of intent – when someone searches for, say, email marketing, they’re exhibiting at least a casual interest in the subject matter. Focused, targeted questions asked to search engines belie even more intent. Searching for email marketing is one thing. Searching for “what is the best email marketing company in Reno, Nevada” displays clear intent, and search marketers have learned to make the most of these long-tail, deep, obscure queries. (they convert like crazy, too)

So how do you detect intent in social media? Let’s use Twitter as an example. What questions belie intent? Think about your own use of language and then start playing mix and match with these keywords:
- recommend
- suggest
- anyone
- [your keyword]
Try it. Try it in Twitter search with your industry keywords and vertical.

Look at a couple of results for “anyone recommend social media”:
- ianrbruce: anyone recommend a good book on social media metrics & measurement?
- splashrafting: anyone recommend free social media measuring tools? Looking at some at present need to start to use more
- hellaPR: Can anyone recommend any good cases or articles on hotels using social media, on a large scale preferably.
Each of these are home runs for a book publisher, a listening company like Radian6, and a socially-engaged hospitality chain. It would take mere seconds to respond and likely convert better than any cold call.

How do you listen? Take your top SEO keyword list (you have one, right?) and combine your top keywords with recommend, suggest, and anyone in various combinations. You’ll be amazed at the number of people blatantly flagging intent to buy your products or services, if only someone were listening.

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February 16, 2010
Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0
From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:
- OMG another social network to manage
- OMG there’s too much noise
- OMG this is so redundant
And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

It’s brilliant.

Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

Buzz is working as intended. Google wants data quality. We immediately filter out completely all the noisemakers who bring no value to the table.

Buzz also incentivizes us in a couple of ways. It tells us to prune back our own spewage lest our friends, the ones we care about truly, unfollow us and eliminate us. It tells us that redundancy of information is of no value to anyone using Buzz, since you can get blog posts and status updates already from FriendFaceTwitterFeedBookSquareWallReader service (now with more blatant self-promotion from social media experts!). So we share and discuss only the stuff that’s either super high quality that we just can’t afford to miss, even if it’s redundant, because of the quality, or we share stuff that’s not being shared elsewhere.

Google figures out from our activity in Buzz that either there’s new stuff to be examined (remember in the initial presentation that Buzzed stuff gets indexed the moment it’s shared, and Google wants to find EVERYTHING to index) or there’s stuff that’s so important and so good that you’ll let it into your inbox even if you can get it elsewhere.

By placing Buzz so close to the incredibly precious, valuable territory that is our inbox, Google is forcing users to reveal what we truly value, what we’re willing to let into a very private space. It’s the perfect walled garden, because instead of enforcing the walls on us, Google simply lets us build the walls for them.

The lesson for marketers and content creators is this: social media 1.0 is drawing to a close. Social Media 2.0 is about relevance, value, and authentic connection, because you will never, as a marketer, get through the gates of the walled garden with a boring-as-crap press release or product announcement. No one cares about you. All of the services, but especially the big ones, are giving users more tools to screen out anything they don’t care about, anything that doesn’t engage them, anything that isn’t actually great quality.

Buzz is just a very visible demonstration of how much crap our “friends” spew out that’s of no value, and why we were so annoyed by it. Now that it’s under control, now that we’re isolating actual friends from “friends” and our networks are getting trimmed, we’re starting to get more value out of it.

And you can bet Google is paying VERY close attention to us and what we do with our Buzz.

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February 11, 2010
The 3 Benefits We Care About
Tony Corinda, the famous magician and mentalist, wrote in his classic textbook 13 Steps to Mentalism that there are three general topics which nearly everyone wants psychic predictions on. Knowing these makes the job of a mentalist on stage incredibly easy, as just providing the hook into any of the topics gets people talking about what they really want.

The three things most people care about and want to know more about?
- Love/Relationships/Sex
- Health
- Money
You could have probably guessed that right off the bat. To no one’s surprise, business is no different. Decision-makers in business – including you, if for no other role than decision-maker of your career – want three general things, too.
- How can I save more money?
- How can I save more time?
- How can I make more money?
Again, no surprise, right?

So why is it that legions of salesmen and saleswomen never actually answer these questions? Take a look at any product spec sheet, from industrial toilets to iPhone apps, and you’ll see features listed by the dozen. This toilet uses 1.4 gallons per flush. This iPhone app can switch between 3G and WiFi seamlessly. This CRM offers RDBMS support for 8 of the most modern RDBMS systems.

So what?

When I talk to vendors, I’m exceptionally blunt. Some appreciate it, some get derailed from their carefully crafted pitch. How will your product save me money? How will your product save me time? How will your product make me more money? If a vendor can answer those questions quickly and intelligently, I’m very likely to just pull the trigger right then and there, as long as their math is sound. If a vendor tries to defer those three questions until later so they can finish their pitch, the phone gets hung up with a polite but curt “not interested but thanks”.

Classic sales books and training materials always advocate answering “What’s in it for me?” as the key question to answer in a sales presentation. Throw those books out, or at least put them back on the shelf. If you can prove a strong case for any one of the three questions – time, money saved, money earned – you’ve answered a core WIIFM question. If you can prove a strong case for more than one of the three questions, prospects will be buying YOU lunch. If you can prove a strong case for all three questions, you can pretty much retire your sales department and just replace them with order takers, because word of mouth alone will be flooding your call center.

Take a look at your own sales and marketing materials today.

Will you save me time?

Will you save me money?

Will you make me more money?

Prove it, and I’m yours.

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February 10, 2010
What World of Warcraft can teach you about customer quality

One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is the in-game marketplace known as the Auction House. Inside the AH, you can see relatively free markets at work with minimal regulation by the game’s owners. You can especially see how market forces create supply and demand, and if you’re good at understanding human nature, you can make a fair bit of virtual money.

Right now, there’s an in-game Valentine’s Day event going on. Below is a picture of the Auction House and the price of a Buttermilk Cream chocolate. The current asking price in the marketplace is $54, and demand is so high that none are currently being sold – the marketplace is empty of this item.

Yes, $54 for a single chocolate. Suddenly the real world holiday doesn’t look quite as expensive. My character here is about to sell 3 of them for $163.

Here’s the funny part: the in-game quests needed to obtain this item take about 5 minutes, total. (dropping off a charm bracelet to another character and offering 10 characters some perfume samples) So why does the price of this chocolate seem so very high compared to the relative amount of work needed to create it? This marketplace item can teach us a lot about customer quality and behavior.

Some players may not know how to obtain it besides the marketplace. They simply buy everything in the marketplace. These, however, are long-term poor customers, because the moment they get clued in, they will stop buying from marketers and start creating their own items. True, as the old gangster saying goes, you can’t wise up a chump, but that’s not the sort of customer you’d want to rely on or build a business on.

Some players like the convenience of one-stop shopping, and will pay a premium just to be able to buy everything in one place. These are better customers because they have a persistent need (convenience). This makes them a better long-term prospective customer as they have a need that will always need to be met. The downside is that these folks are usually very price-sensitive, so a competitor who prices the same goods at even a penny less will beat you to the sale. If supply is a greater issue than demand, unless you’re always the lowest price, you won’t sell anything.

Some players just don’t like questing, period. They pay a premium in the marketplace – sometimes a very high premium – to not spend a single minute in the game doing things that aren’t fun for them. If you can provide exactly what they need, when they need it, you’ll develop a reputation in-game for being a useful sort of marketer to have around, and the kind of person who they will approach directly whenever they need to buy something. These folks will even ignore marketplace prices and just pay you obscene premiums directly because they know you’re reliable and can get them exactly what they want. It almost goes without saying that these are your very best customers in the long-term.

We have, in short, three kinds of customers – the sucker who may or may not even buy, the customer who wants convenience but is super-sensitive to price, and the premium buyer who wants to outsource everything they don’t want to do.

Which do you want as a customer? Common sense should dictate that if it’s long-term maximum profitability you’re after, you want the premium buyer. It will require more work on your part to develop reputation in your community for being the go-to marketer that has exactly what someone needs, but if you put in the time and effort in your marketplace, you can escape the always-lowest-prices race and make a ton of money.

Now, would anyone like to buy a Buttermilk Cream? Only three left…

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February 9, 2010

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