Tide Wisdom - part 1 (Marketing Points from the Mundane)

There is always something to learn no matter where you are or what you are doing. 

It’s the type of annoying statement your mother would make but unfortunately many times your mother was right.  (My mother doesn’t read this blog or else I couldn’t admit that.)  I went to the store last night to pick up a few last minute things for the week.  While I was there I also purchased a “Tide to Go” pen which had not been on my list.  The Tide pen ended up being left on the kitchen table overnight so while I was eating lunch today I looked over my spur of the moment purchase and realized I had a bonafied 3 part marketing series staring me in the face. Without further ado here is the first installment of “Tide Wisdom”. 

Warning - Tide Wisdom is not cutting edge marketing information as much as a reminder of things we often forget to take advantage of.  If you’re the owner of a top tier ecommerce site this won’t be big news - but it’s money left on the screen (so to speak) by a lot of smaller websites.

First Point: I purchased the “Tide to Go” pen because it was placed where my eyes would be roaming while I waited in line for the cashier. 

Brick and morter companies have been doing this forever and many online companies have made quite a few dollars the same way.  In fact I’ve heard Amazon described as ”changing the way you shop online” but in reality they simply took an old theory used in every grocery store, mini-mart and department store I’ve ever been in and re-tooled it for the interent.  Amazon doesn’t have a physical checkout line so they began displaying items that they think you might want to buy along the sides of the main content and even in the main content itself.  One advantage they had over Wal-Mart is that they could customize the items display based on your browsing patterns, even telling you what people purchased after they had looked at the same item.  Genius?  No.  Sound business principle?  Yep, and it can be a profitable one too.  If you have a website that sells items or services and you are not using your site space to present related items/hot picks/monthly specials then you are ignoring conversions plain and simple.  I didn’t go looking for a “Tide to Go” pen - I found it by chance and throwing caution to the wind spent an additional $2.78 in hopes the next time I spilled taco sauce on a shirt at a business lunch I could cover up my mistake.  (Problem is I’ll never remember to take it to the meeting.)  Your visitors may not visit the page you designed for “household widget”, may not even think about getting a “household widget” while they are going to your site but you can grab a few more $2.78 purchases (and much more) by placing the product information where they are likely to see it while scanning the page. 

Not sure how users scan a webpage?  Take a look at these pages for suggestions:

• Google Adsense Heat Map - Google offers advice on where to put their Adsense advertisements to publishers.  After all we are talking about you advertising your products -  just on your own site.
• F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content - based on Jakob Nielsen’s research.  He might be mildly goofy looking but a lot of people think he’s pretty smart - including Jakob.

“Tide Wisdom” - part 2 coming soon.