News & Press

I keep coming back to this subject, I think at the start of this blog I should cover the roots of a successful e-commerce site.  This is the offering that the store sells, the premise of the site.

If you do not have the magic three M’s all working together then you site is not going to be pulling in the sales.  The difference between getting two of the M’s right and one M wrong is massive.  The three M’s I am talking about are

Market

Message

Media

I used to think that I could start an online business and then see if there was any interest and then ramp it up.  My idea was to start many online ideas and then see which one took off.  However this means that I did not have the focus on any one business to get the three M’s right and therefore nothing florished.  Instead to be successful you should concentrate on one venture at a time and give it your total concentration and then if it fails remember to

Fail Fast

Fail Cheaply

If you do not have an existing business then you are probably going to have to play around with the formula until something works.

Lets talk about the three Ms in more detail.

Market – The market must be there in order to sell to, obvious? Yes.  But what is not obvious is that markets exist differently in different medias.  By Media I mean the method you are going to use to get your message across.  So for example magazine advertising is a media.  What I often see is people that do not match their market and media.  This can be bad news in an otherwise sucessful business.  If you wanted to sell coaching to CEO’s chances are that the search engine terms would not exist to transmit your message.  You could look at the keyword research tools all you want trying to find terms that CEOs use to find coaching programs but they do not exist.  They do not exist becuase this target customer does not use this medium to find this type of service.  It does not mean they do not need this service but if you plan on using SEO then you will fail.  Therefore you need to make sure that your target market matches with your media.

Message – The message is what you are going to tell your market and this will make them buy.  The message is the key that unlocks the sales once the market and media is matched.  The message needs to be strong enough to let the buyer know that you are the answer to their dreams.

How is your message?

Imagine this.

Your target customer is sitting across from his computer.  He can see the screen but he has just collapsed on the sofa for the night, he is tired and watching his favourite TV program that is captivating.  What’s more his wallet is in the car and to get it he has to find his shoes and go out into the cold night.  Then on his computer screen he sees your message.

Is your message good enough to get this guy off the couch, go into the car, log into his computer and make him buy?

If not then you are going to have a problem.  You message needs to be so compelling that people move mountains to buy.  So start thinking about how you can get your customer of his/her couch and onto your site.

Media – The media is the method by which your message is being delivered to your market.  This can be PPC, SEO, direct mail etc.  As mentioned above you need to make sure that your media matches your market.  It is no good sending mail to customers that are constantly travelling. Email to technophobes. Advertising in magazines to people who have no time to read.  You can find out before you start spending whether your market is reachable via different media by doing research.

Market research for most ‘newbie’ ecommerce people mostly consists of ‘is there a market’.  Where it really need to focus on all the three Ms.  There are obvious markets that are sometimes just unreachable by your business.  This can be a very costly mistake.

I would be interested to hear about any business you have started where you realised that you had one of the three M’s missing.  What was it, maybe we can all learn together.  Please in the comments.