It’s logical – if a business has a poor-quality website lacking features designed to turn a visit from a targeted audience member into a value-add experience, then there’s not much point trying to develop traffic to that site. It’s also logical that, if an investment has been made to develop and deploy a world-class website, then unless there’s a parallel strategy to develop traffic, the investment will be a waste of money.
In this section, we’re going to expand on the importance of content as a requirement for developing sustainable website traffic and as the foundation for improving awareness with regards to a resellers value proposition.
A typical mistake made by resellers in the office products and supplies arena with regards to their websites and their web strategy has been to focus only on the product catalog and the selling of products out of that catalog.
The failure here is to understand that only a small percentage of web-traffic is ready to buy at any moment in time. If all a reseller does is to continually “go-for-the-kill”, aggressively pursuing poorly targeted campaigns to promote transactions for products in its catalog, then it fails to cater to the much larger segment of traffic that may be looking for something else at that time.
In order to expand the audience a website caters to there are two major components that must be accounted for within the content that’s published and accessible from the site:
Let’s expand on these two components:
1. Firstly, educating a relevant audience and specifically with regards to the office products industry.
We are part of a very large market – $25 billion spent per year in the United States alone on ink and toner. Probably close to $200 billion spent annually on all the products typically required to operate an office, including office products, furniture, hardware, software, etc. Not much argument … this is a large market that’s undergoing rapid change as workers go mobile and technology changes the way old-school workflows take place.
There is no shortage of material for resellers to create relevant content about, and to target this material at researching buyer’s who are starting to realize the old way of doing things is not likely to still be the best way of doing things.
The two largest retail players serving this market are Office Depot and Staples. Between them, they have around $25 billion in U.S. sales and close to 50% of these are transaction conducted online. This equates to $12 billion in e-commerce. There should be little argument with regards to whether or not buyers of items required for the office are willing to conduct a significant portion of their business online because they already are. Between Office Depot and Staples there is a combined volume of 275,000 unique daily visitors.
How can a smaller sized independent reseller intercept some of this traffic and start to compete effectively with organizations such as Office Depot and Staples?
2. Typically, this is where the second mistake occurs.
It’s not difficult for a reseller to look at sites like Office Depot and Staples, and it’s not too difficult to copy their format. However, this is usually where it starts to go wrong for a smaller independent reseller.
We’re continually advocating the importance of content on a resellers website for the purposes of establishing trust and authority as well as for the purposes of educating site visitors – such as researching buyers. However, it’s notable this type of content on websites such as those deployed by Office Depot, Staples, New Egg, Tiger Direct, Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc. appears to be absent – at least on the surface.
Because it is likely many independent office products resellers looked at these competing e-commerce sites and then attempted to replicate them, they have overlooked the requirements for the type of content that’s required for them to develop a successful web strategy. Copying the strategies and tactics of large organizations simply don’t work for smaller independent resellers. In failing to create content for the purposes of educating the target audience and for building trust and authority, the independent reseller’s web strategy is badly flawed.
Large organizations with high traffic volumes have many other factors in their favor which allow their strategies to work, which we’ll expand on in the next section when we deal with the “science” underlying internet traffic. For now, we’re going to continue to focus on the importance of the content component for a smaller independent reseller and its web strategy.
For a large industry, there’s a remarkable absence of content “about” the industry. Internally, we focus on the aftermarket and lament the declining aftermarket share. There’s a focus on the challenging market conditions and there’s intense competition between the traditional “brick and mortar” office products dealer and the online marketplaces. These combine to drive prices down and damage the long-term viability of the reseller channel. That there’s a $20 billion growth opportunity on the ink and toner that underpins the $200 billion industry is mostly misunderstood or ignored.
For the most part, resellers haven’t earned the right to participate in the $20 billion growth opportunity because they haven’t deployed tactics necessary to earn the respect and trust of researching buyers before they will seriously consider alternatives. Resellers have been unable to deploy platforms that enable them to demonstrate to researching buyers they are experts, and their value proposition deserves consideration.
Content has not been created to specifically educate potential customers about the industry and the aftermarket options with a purpose to build authority, demonstrate knowledge, and establish trustworthy credentials for doing business with the buyers that collectively spend $20 billion every year on high-priced OEM cartridges.
Resellers have collectively failed to earn their way into the $20 billion growth opportunity because they lack the technology platforms and digital presence to do so.
Instead, despite the availability of high-quality alternatives, resellers have had to mostly sit back, passively allowing the OEMs to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about aftermarket alternatives.
Unfortunately, creating high-quality content strategically targeted at buyers who may be researching long before they’re ready to make a buying decision, is not easy. In fact, the requirements are typically overwhelming for a smaller independent reseller, especially when they’re factored alongside the challenges associated with developing web traffic.
Furthermore, and significantly compounding the time-allocation dilemma, most of the skills required for creating, targeting, and publishing content, and then to coordinate this for the purposes of developing web traffic, are outside the capabilities of typical resellers in the office products industry.
This is not an encouraging combination, but it helps explain the underlying failure of smaller independent resellers to develop relevant traffic for the purpose of acquiring new customers and growing their business in a declining market.
Chapter 6: Science underlying web traffic