This Dodo knows how to sell
If you look around, most businesses are Dodos when it comes to marketing and selling their products online.
Their websites are out of date and clumsy, and their online sales are all but extinct.
Whether it’s a ugly website or the inability to communicate what makes their offering remarkable, plenty of businesses struggle to present a professional online presence that builds trust and gets people to pull out their credit cards.
However, there are businesses that are doing it right and as it turns out you have to be a Dodo to copy them.
In this case I use the word Dodo because I’m referring to the company DODOcase. DODOcase makes high-end iPad cases and have sold more than 10,000 units at $60 a pop because they understand how to present and position their product to consumers.
Let’s look at how they do it.
1. Attractive Design that Showcases Your Product
Lets face it, people definitely judge a book by it’s cover. Humans prefer things that are pleasing to the eye and subsequently place a higher value on them.
Therefore how you “package” your business with your website is just as important as how you package and design your products themselves. In fact both need to work hand in hand.
And even though every product isn’t exciting or sexy, a website can still package and present a boring product it in a beautiful way.
For physical products, this means professional photographs that don’t look like they were taken with your point and shoot camera at your kitchen table.
And for digital products like online training and software, you can still “package” them with a great looking website, sales page or even graphical representations created with e-cover software.
DODOcase does an excellent job showcasing both their product with beautiful photography, as well as their company with an attractive website.
The fist thing you see when you land on their site is a gorgeous slideshow that takes up a large amount of real estate. They have a physical, and very visual product so showcasing it in this fashion is a good way to introduce it to visitors.
But what if you’re selling a digital product like software? Well a slideshow with a bunch of screenshots might be okay, but a video demonstrating how the product works would be more effective.
What you present visitors with first depends on what you’re offering but it needs to be visually appealing.
2. Tell A Story – Position Your Business
“It’s the story, not the good or the service you actually sell, that pleases the customer.” – Seth Godin
Telling a story about your business and your products is ultimately what makes someone choose your offering over the competition.
Unless you tell a story that carves out a unique position or premise in your prospects mind, you’re simply competing on price which you always want to avoid.
“The Rolls Royce of iPad cases”
The DODOcase story is about a small group of artisans in San Fransisco who use traditional book-binding techniques to make handcrafted cases that feel like hardcover books but are adapted to modern devices like the iPad.
Even though at its core the DODOcase is just an iPad case, the story behind it makes it more than that. It’s no longer just about protecting your iPad but also about using quality materials, supporting local artisans and taking traditional techniques and adapting them to modern technology.
DODOcase makes your iPad better by telling you a story. And the story is what makes you want to buy a case from them instead of the competition, regardless of price.
Storytelling works when the story actually makes the product better.
3. Social Proof
If you’re a blogger then you already know the important role social proof plays in making your content seem more valuable.
As long as you have decent numbers, highlighting elements like the number of blog comments, subscribers and retweets your blog generates helps to provide visitors with quick-reference cues for deciding whether your stuff is worth reading.
But what about a small business website? Even one without a blog?
Well, social proof is just as important. Things like customer testimonials, media mentions or even displaying positive tweets about your business can act as important psychological triggers that work to build trust and help convert visitors into customers.
DODOcase places a large focus on using social proof as a trust building tool on their website by prominently displaying quotes and logos linking to leading tech blogs and mainstream media that have mentioned or endorsed their product.
Even if you don’t bother reading the reviews, just seeing those logos tells you these guys have a product worth talking about and therefore probably worth buying.
What’s Missing?
DODOcase does an exellent job showcasing their product, telling their story and building trust with social proof, but they also have a few opportunities they could take advantage of to really take things to the next level.
Content Strategy
While they have a blog, it’s mainly company focused comprised of announcements and news related to their products.
To ramp up their content marketing efforts even more they could shift to a more customer focused approach and start posting iPad tips and tutorials or even app reviews.
This would help them begin to pull in more traffic from search engines and social media sharing sites where this kind of content is particularly popular among gadget geeks and travels easily on places like Twitter.
Content that’s valuable on its own and lacks and immediate sales pitch is really what we’re really talking about. You give something away for free (iPad tips, tutorials and reviews) and sell something related (iPad cases).
Email list building
Once a more robust content marketing strategy is in place, so is the foundation for building an email list of prospects who haven’t bought yet. Folks come for the helpful free content and sign up for email updates which in turn gives you permission to take them off road to sell once in a while.
What about you? Do you know of any other sites doing a good job when it comes to selling online?
Great case study!
One thing I remind clients I coach for digital marketing strategies is that they want to work towards building relationships of permission. One example would be to offer a weekly iPad tips email newsletter where they really pack in good ideas — better yet have a call for dodoo customers to submit their best tips, apps and uses to feature so that it becomes a dodoo community spotlight medium. Customers love being featured — it also increases pass along momentum across their own circles of influence. And anyone with an iPad that receives it has a high chance of subscribing for themselves and be introduced to the brand and products for a future purchase!
Agreed Kenny.
I think important takeaway for companies and startups is that if they are going to have a blog or content strategy it needs to be customer focused instead of company focused.