OK, so that’s deliberately a bit provocative but I do wonder whether actually a lot of investment in marketing might actually be better focused on creating an outstanding proposition, product and customer service. Get that right and the internet, and your customers, will do a great job of doing the marketing for you – actually a much more (cost) effective job than you ever could.

What do most of the great internet success stories (think Google, Skype, Flickr etc.) have in common? They all famously ‘spent almost nothing on marketing’. Their product or service was just so good, or innovative, that they didn’t need to push it – their customers sold it for them. Indeed, to this day, I know lots of ‘Product Managers’ who work at Google but I haven’t yet met anyone who has marketing in their job title who represents a Google service.

If your offering and customer experience is outstanding then it’s not just the benefits of viral marketing that you’ll get. Look across all forms of online marketing and you’ll do better. Search engine optimisation – you’ll do well there because presumably people will be linking to you saying how great you are. Affiliate Marketing – you’ll do well there because your conversion rates will be higher than your competitors so affiliates will want to send their traffic your way as the earnings per click (EPC) you can deliver will be higher than they can get elsewhere.

Perhaps the only two metrics that we should obsess about are 1) Customer Experience and 2) Customer Satisfaction. All the rest (like conversion and retention metrics) would then take care of themselves. And yet, of all the metrics and KPIs I ever hear discussed, these two are rarely even on the consideration list.

Maybe this is the true secret of the mythical “Web 2.0”? Forget sales and marketing and focus all your efforts on proposition, product and service development.

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

Back at the end of the seventies (so we're definitely  talking Web -15.0 here, but bear with me) I helped turn round a mail order company which had been a byword for "nightmare" within its sector.

We did this by becoming quite obessive about same-day shipping and empowering despatch people to use their initiative and send by first-class letter post if the item wasn't too heavy.

So, at a time when "allow 28 days for delivery" was the norm our stuff started turning up the next day. It was a long time before we even thought about making any claims in magazine adverts, but we noticed some definite effects fairly quickly.

One of those was that people started adopting new channels for placing their orders. They would phone, instead of sending in the magazine order form (1979, remember...). Simply including the order number, as everyone did, had little impact, but teaching by doing and delivering the service worked. Our customers changed their behaviour. The word also got around remarkably quickly. The reaction is one of delight (and still is) when the service is much better than other offerings. Delight is something which people tend to share.

I've repeated the same process several times since for different companies and can assure you it works. The mechanisms for customers spreading the word are also far, far better than they ever were, so the impact of such a campaign is much magnified.

With that in mind, I'd quibble about the subject line. This has always been one of the best methods of marketing there is, and most marketing people know it. It's just a bit of a slog to do and tends to involve touching boxes and hanging out with people who touch boxes.

Our online site www.bobsguide.com  only really took off when we got a new MD to run it.  Although we were noticably more successful I didn't see the people on phones making calls that I expected.  I asked if we shouldn't be doing more selling and her answer was that she saw here people as customer service staff, with the emphasis on service. 

After a few years a a steady growth in sales I have to say that she has been proved dead right and I was dead wrong. 

We still do marketing of course, exhibitions and the like.  But one bad customer service experience is enough for you to lose a customer forever, so it remains our emphasis.

Bob

Ashley, I do here what you are saying, but actually I think it depends on your definition of "Marketing staff".

We have a very integrated marketing team here at Hotels.com were analysts, seo-experts, crm manager etc. work closely together to create a single integrated system (business) ... we find the right users at the right places through targeted marketing and take them to the relevant pages and therefore enhance their user experience.

Our analyst team is very key to understand how users interact with the site and this in turn helps us to adjust customer user flows through the site.

Just think about your "online marketing wheel/framework" - acquisition, conversion and retention are all parts managed by marketers and it needs to be closely integrated between the different functions.

I do agree that great applications/web sites generate "free" traffic ... it just depends on how patient you are and whether you just want to wait for them or push it a little bit as well ...