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How much is IM to do with marketing skills vs. quality of product?

by steadypay
17 replies
I was just thinking if the marketer was really skilled could they sell a useless product? I'm not saying you would want to or should I'm just looking at an extreme example to draw attention to a point to examine how much a sale relies on the marketer's skill.

Of course everyone wants a quality product but beside that what other factors are involved? I've just been browsing seduction material which is something I have knowledge on and was thinking a large part of it is knowing the market and knowing what trends the market is going in. Is this correct?

As such I think staying within a market I know about would be a good advantage for me because I will have a much better idea of what to specialize in rather than learning a whole new market each time.

So knowing your niche would come under marketing skills I'd say. Tying it back to the title I was thinking that rather than the product necessarily being quality it could be more about what hot buzz everyone is on at this particular time and capitalizing on peoples demand for one particular current trend. By this I mean it isn't necessarily about a product having objective value but rather having relative value to the market at that particular time. Is this correct from people's experience?

What do others think?
#marketing #product #quality #skills
  • Profile picture of the author marcuslim
    Well, it is certainly possible to sell someone a crappy product, but you can only do so once, and they won't get tricked again a second time. So marketing is certainly important, but most importantly it's all about giving them many times more value than what they paid for, then they'll become a customer for life.
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    • Profile picture of the author JasonWestwick
      Originally Posted by timyang View Post

      Well, it is certainly possible to sell someone a crappy product, but you can only do so once, and they won't get tricked again a second time. So marketing is certainly important, but most importantly it's all about giving them many times more value than what they paid for, then they'll become a customer for life.

      Completely true, yes you can sell a product using pure marketing skills and hype but unless you provide real value the customer is not going to purchase from you again, and the refund rate will be extremely high.

      I'm sure all of us at some point or another in our IM careers have bought a complete dud of a product because of a great sales page, I know I did with a few when first starting out, they may have tricked me once but they never received another penny from me again.
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      • Profile picture of the author steadypay
        Right.

        I'm starting to understand this a bit more.

        I guess it would be slash n burn/pump n dump type sales rather than a good mix of marketing and quality product. I mean the marketing part is necessary simply due to fierce competition but then once the customer buys they will/should be satisfied due to it being a quality product.

        Trust goes up as you as a legit referrer and they come back and so on and so forth.
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  • Profile picture of the author forexaffiliate
    You can sell pretty much anything. More often than not, to sell useless products is not as easy as to sell a good product. If you have the marketing skills to sell pretty much anything, why sell something that is useless?
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  • Profile picture of the author deertrail
    Yes, as others have said, you can fool a person *once* with a bad product.

    But as advertising becomes more expensive across multiple channels, resulting in higher customer acquisition costs, repeat business will become a life and death issue for your business (if it isn't already).

    You can build a promotion, or you can build a business, with loyal repeat customers.

    I recommend the later.

    -Bryan
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  • Profile picture of the author steadypay
    Well in the real world obviously loads of ppl do sell ripoffs cos the internet is bloated with crap and survival of the fittest says there would not be so much crap around if there weren't enough suckers to keep buying it thus perpetuating the cycle.

    That's what I was thinking though about bum marketing, you can stay anonymous i.e. never having a static blog, and drawing a bad name to yourself, while just doing pump and dump promos and one product to the next can you not?

    I'm not particularly sticking on this cos I want to be a snakeoil salesman but rather find it interesting that this is a skill and with such a skill you could sell something you perhaps personally did not believe in or knew nothing about if your marketing skills were good enough. So just looking at it in an amoral sense.

    Like my mum used to say to me as a kid when I used to sell all kinds of stuff to friends 'you could sell ice to the eskimos'.
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  • Profile picture of the author AndrewCavanagh
    Originally Posted by steadypay View Post

    I was just thinking if the marketer was really skilled could they sell a useless product?
    Yes you certainly could but a skilled marketer would be unlikely to do that because he'd understand that that real value is in the relationship of trust you build with your clients.

    That allows you to go back and sell products and service to those clients over and over.

    You're on the right track thinking of finding a hungry or hot market first.

    Even better is to find a hungry market you can get easy and economical access to.

    In other words already have the joint venture set up with a list owner or the pay per click campaign tested or the list hire organized before you start trying to create a product.

    That will help you get your product focused entirely on the hungry market you know you're going to be selling to and also allows you to test the market so see what appeals to them most.

    Kindest regards,
    Andrew Cavanagh
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    • Profile picture of the author mrdomains
      Successful Internet Marketing is all about continuity.

      Keeping the connection with your audience (list, clients, etc) over time, is where the true profit is. This is helped by you having their trust and respect... which tends to be difficult if you subject them to low quality stuff.

      I subscribe to a lot of lists as part of my research and I am often surprised at how much crap many reputable marketers are willing to push through their lists. Most of the material is not their own and in the majority of cases they haven´t even checked the value / content / quality of the item they are pushing.

      One of the main reasons why a lot of marketers have their lists in perpetual rebuild status. And why some stars their glow prematurely.
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  • Profile picture of the author bdm
    You can bad products, but I highly suggest selling quality. If you over deliver to your customers they will buy from you again and again. Selling to a repeat customer is way easier then a new one.
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  • Profile picture of the author Robert Puddy
    marketing is what sells the product (good or bad)

    Quality is what keeps your refund rates down, and brings in repeat buyers

    But you have to realise that marketing is the key, because unless they buy they have no idea of what the quality of the product is
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  • Profile picture of the author Rough Outline
    Sales skills is all about getting the custom first time around.

    Quality of product is what keeps customers coming back.
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  • Profile picture of the author TomBuck
    If you ask me its always about the sales page and marketing. All Sales pages look the same don't you agree? You never know what your buying any more. 50% of the products I have brought were rubbish but had such a good sales page. Marketing is more getting the traffic to the sales page.
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  • Profile picture of the author steadypay
    Well in terms of quality products vs. marketing anything I was thinking one advantage to marketing anything is you wouldn't have to spend time finding good products and could just focus on your marketing.

    As you are all saying I see it would be a dumb idea to take the time to gather a loyal following and dump crap on them cos then you'd have to rebuild again.

    Hmm I suppose then that in the long term it would be best to do the trust and loyalty route cos even if the pump and dump method were effective short term, over the long haul the time saved researching for quality products would be negated by having to constantly find new customers if you 'rip people off' all the time.
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  • Profile picture of the author jbsmith
    Having created dozens of products and having helped others to create hundreds, for me marketing and a great product go hand-in-hand.

    Without a proper understanding (which involves a marketing mindset) you will not be able to create a great product. Here's the winnning formula...

    1. Look at your market with a marketing mindset to discover what they want and why
    2. Know the motivations that are MOST behind the urgency in wanting what you discover in #1 - this becomes BOTH the guiding principle behind the design AND marketing of your product
    3. Offer a solution in line with the urgent want
    4. Market in line with the want and how your new product helps them get what they want

    Planning, creating and marketing a product are all much more closely linked than many people believe - at least the great ones are :-)

    Jeff
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  • Profile picture of the author JonAlfredsson
    i would exert a lot of my effort in my marketing strategy but i make sure that the products i'm selling will work perfectly for my clients. for me, providing the best products will not only result to lower refund rates but also more clients since i will be recommended to others in the process.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mehak
    hey I know what you mean, sometimes there is a lot of hype and people just follow the crowd.
    However I think you need to sit down and think of the reasons you purchased the system, there must be some advantages to it. It doesn't come down to sales, I think there will always be a demand for products somewhere. We just have to find the right channels so the right people see our message.
    Sometimes people just connect with you so it doesn't matter what you're selling they will buy from you anyway.
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