It happened again. I heard from yet another client about how a “Blue Bird” (aka unexpected sale) happened via their website. What’s so unusual about that – after all isn’t that what a website is supposed to do?
The unusual part is what happened to the visitor after they got to the website. And, I should hasten to add that it usually happened over several visits to the site.
What happened is they started to ‘go steady’ with the company; except the company was not aware of it. They started to assign attributes of a relationship to the business such that by they time they finally engaged and connected to them there was a bond already established in their mind.
So, I keep getting reports from clients that usually start out with some variation on “an interesting thing happened…” and then they tell me about their new customer and how incredibly easy it was to land them. In fact, some of them actually felt like their customer landed them!
What’s happening?
In all instances someone came to their site and found generous, relevant, useful information. So useful, that they kept coming back. The information was part of a web strategy to use content to increase their presence in search engines, build relevant traffic to the site, and keep people engaged when they arrived.
Because the information that they valued was also written by an identified person, they developed some level of trust and a cyber-relationship with the author of the material (in most cases the author was listed as the CEO or other senior executive).
What’s more, it didn’t seem to matter how they got to the site – in some instances it was because they read content that the author published elsewhere online that then drove them into the site. In other cases, it was through a search engine. The channel was interesting but not necessarily relevant to what then occurred.
What occurred was an upending of their normal sales process. New customer acquisition that used to take weeks or even months was happening right away – sometimes immediately.
The customer was pulled into them instead of the company pushing their message out and then having to spend time building the necessary credentials and trust to even get close to the final round of consideration. The prospect (soon to become customer) already trusted them and assigned a level of competence to them; they were fans.
Another important caveat: I do not work with super-large companies. Most of my clients are fast-growing small/mid-size businesses. They do not carry the baggage of a large, impersonal brand and so it is probably a lot easier for this to happen.
The unexpected consequence was this incredible cyber-relationship that transcended normal behavior and produced such powerful results for them in far less time than normal with significantly less effort.
Can we depend on this for steady-state online marketing? I don’t think so – but it sure beats all when it happens.
