The Problem with Automated Marketing


The problem with automated marketing can easily be summed in the words “selling skill”.

I am not talking about ‘marketing’… I am talking about the ability to sell… sell … sell.

See most people can be good at marketing, but when it comes to selling… it’s a whole different story.

To sell something requires more than marketing, it requires an understanding of your buyer… a deep understanding and the ability to communicate in words and images the reason someone should buy whatever it is you’re selling and to understand major trends and trend forces … to “enter the conversation already going on in their mind,” as a famous copywriter once said.

But here is the big problem with ‘automated’ anything: It’s not human. It’s machineware…

People don’t buy from automated systems, they buy from people… people they trust.

You can automate almost everything in your business except that one intangible thing: the human touch.

To me that is the biggest problem with automated systems on the Internet, the lack of humanity, … to buy anything you want to know that you’re dealing with a person and not a faceless company or ’system’… that’s why you can automate everything else except selling…

Selling is a personal skill. It requires you to put yourself in your buyers shoes and sense their objections before they ask… fell the pain they feel… and offer a solution that best fits their situation.

You don’t see a lot of really fine-tuned selling skills in email newsletters…. Agora’s offers are the best I have ever read. Their copy is selling perfection… or as close as you can get.

The reason you do not see very good selling in email marketing is that the market is so hot right now, good sales copy isn’t required to make a sale… people will jump and just about anything that looks decent.

But that will change, making it harder for anyone to make a sale without really top-quality selling skills.

You might be scratching your head saying, “Gee, if it’s easy to make a sale now, I must be doing something wrong because I can’t sell anything!“…

And that’s my point… the bar is being raised almost daily and the offers that worked 1 year ago, no longer hold water.

There are other reasons it’s getting tougher and tougher to sell online - if you’re unskilled in the art of selling - one of those other factors is the ‘life cycle’ of a product… products are released and die within months, sometimes weeks!

Think of “Firesales”… they were hot now where are they? I guess there are still a few around, but they are almost dead. “Big” product launches have been huge in 2006… will they be in 2007? Maybe, maybe not… they will probably be replaced with some other ‘new’ marketing strategy.

Being on top of trends, markets and Internet technology all help to craft sales strategy but who can keep up with it all? Unless you’re dedicated to online trends, current marketing strategy and technology changes it will be hard to keep up. It’s a full-time job and then some- it takes up a lot, a lot of my time.

That brings us full-circle: Selling is a personal skill that is crafted on an awareness of these trends, or “major forces that can neither be shaped or stopped, but only watched carefully and guide your copy along these line” as Eugene Schwartz, the famous copywriter, would say as well as being able to enter a person’s conversation in their mind.

Selling in not just the ability to write a few entertaining ‘trigger’ words in an email… it’s being able to harness the forces of major trends, capturing them in your copy in a way that makes the sale.

Heady stuff, but oh so important.

Do you find it difficult to ’sell’?… to convince people to buy your products or affiliate products?

What I’ve said here may be the problem… and it’s alos the problem and failure of using ‘automated systems’ to sell products and services online… people buy from people, not machineware or systems.

Praveen Kumar is a retired Submarine Captain. He has a passion for real estate investing for capital growth and internet marketing for cash flow. He has been helping others, who share the same vision, to start their home businesses and become financially free. Please click here to learn more about what he has to offer.

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