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In the days of yore, there were only a few channels on television.
If you wanted to get a message out, you simply bought enough advertising to push your message in front of people.
What was scarce what the air time or the shelf space in a store.
Today is different.
There’s an unlimited amount of mass media channels and…
“…the only thing that’s scarce is attention.”
–Seth Godin
With the advent of the Internet, there is no limited “air time” or limited “shelf space.”
It’s a blessing and a curse.
A blessing because now you can get “air time” You can get your products out there.
The problem is, “Who cares?”
Who’s watching and paying attention?
Customer Attention is Scarce
Learning how to sell on Amazon.com is how you can get your products out there in front of millions of potential customers for example.
But how will customers notice your product?
How will your ideas spread?
If you’re selling someone else’s product the task becomes much harder, but if you’re aiming to build a sustainable business, one that makes the competition on Amazon irrelevant, you’ll build your own brand of value.
But let’s say you’ve started to develop a brand, and you want so badly for your products to be noticed (and thus purchased).
How do you bring attention to your products?
Do you Advertise?
“Advertising is the price of being boring.”
-Andy Sernovitz
Advertising can bring traffic, but not everyone advertises…
Amazon.com used to advertise, and then, they decided to stop.
Analysts thought this would be the end of the world for Amazon.
What Amazon decided to do was put that money they’d spend on advertising and put it into offering free shipping to their customers instead.
You’ve witnessed what that’s done for them. They’re the largest marketplace on earth and continue to improve. (See the book Free Prize Inside for more on that).
What did Amazon Do to Gain Customers?
What did Amazon do that increased their sales and helped bring them to the very top?
They didn’t go for an expensive advertising campaign to drive eyeballs to their site. In fact, they cut advertising out of the picture.
Amazon went against the idea of advertising, of trying to promote themselves through TV, billboards, radio, you name it.
What they did something is something special.
They did what you can do.
What’s the Secret Sauce to Marketing?
Let’s circle back to what Seth Godin said about attention being scarce.
If attention is scarce, it gets really hard to push a message in front of someone, and it’s something that they don’t appreciate.
What can you do that Amazon did?
They made something remarkable, and as Seth wisely said, something remarkable is simply something worth making a remark about.
Your product, your brand, your website, your message—find a way to make it remarkable, worth making a remark about.
Being remarkable isn’t limited to your physical products.
Shoes are Kinda Boring…Right?
Think about TOMS Shoes. A shoe’s a shoe right? The innovations in shoes are pretty small from year to year. How do you make a shoe remarkable?
TOMS did it. But they did it in their message.
With every pair you purcahse, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need.
–TOMS
They’re shoes are great, but there are a lot of great shoes.
TOMS did something remarkable with their brand and their message and it’s been a catalyst for their success.
Your Business Selling on Amazon can be Remarkable Too
The possibilities are endless.
If it can be done with a shoe, you can do it too.
What is it about your company, products, brand, or message that you could make remarkable?
- Sometimes it’s giving away something free (to your customers or someone in need).
- Sometimes it’s creating a community that shares a common interest.
- Sometimes it’s the product itself that has something about it that makes it remarkable.
How much attention is your product getting? It’s getting as much as you give customers reason to remark about.
Even though attention may be scarce, the possibilities are endless to enable your customers to be the ones who spread the remarkable about your company, your brand, your message, or your products.