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Why Your Product Is Not What You Sell

How does a playing card company end up becoming one of the world’s most enduringly popular video game makers? Or how does an online bookseller evolve into the most popular global marketplace?

Nintendo and Amazon understood the ageless principle that your product is not what you sell. If you’re struggling to get the revenue you desire or your marketing isn’t converting, you might be selling the wrong thing.

Find out why your product is not what you sell. Then discover how to sell the solutions to people’s needs and wants.

Key Takeaways:

  • The key to successful selling is providing the core solutions to your target audience’s challenges and problems.
  • Nintendo, GoPro, and Amazon are great examples of selling solutions, while Kodak, Blockbuster, and Blackberry are cautionary tales.
  • Sell solutions by finding customer pain points, empathizing with them, sharing excellent problem-solving content, and using smart CTAs.

The Reasoning Behind Why Your Product Is Not What You Sell

A lot of marketing is practical psychology. When you know what makes people tick, you become a more effective seller and marketer.

Every human action springs from responding to a perceived need or desire, so start by understanding basic human needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow classified these needs into five categories that you can see in the graph below:

Marketers use Maslow’s hierarchy to communicate how they solve needs because your product is not what you sell.

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Anything you sell should fulfill a fundamental need. Even supposed wants, like entertainment and hobbies, actually satisfy the need for self-actualization (expressing ourselves as individuals).

When people feel like you have the practical answer to a problem or desire, they’ll readily buy that solution. So, at its core, your product is not what you sell, but you’re providing a solution to a necessity or want.

For example, Pepsi is offering even more than quenching thirst. The cola company also sells a youthful lifestyle and inclusivity as its brand story.

This information probably reminds you of the decades-old practice of solution selling. But isn’t solution selling dead?

Examples of Successful Solution Selling

Rumors of solution selling’s demise were premature. While aspects of the old model have changed, you’re still only ever filling someone’s need with a solution.

For example, insight selling came along to replace solution selling. However, a closer look shows that it’s really just an updated version of the previous format:

Insight selling is a modern version of solution selling when your product is not what you sell.

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For a simpler variation, you might like this breakdown of SPIN selling:

Alt Text: SPIN selling helps you move beyond selling products because your product is not what you sell.

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Whether you call it insight selling, SPIN selling, or something else, your product is not what you sell. You have to sell a solution; just adapt it to the times.

How You Can Screw It Up

Kodak whiffed majorly by not using its market dominance to keep up with the times and digital photography. (You could say similar things about Blockbuster, MySpace, and Blackberry.)

Funnily enough, Kodak actually invented the first digital camera. However, the company’s downfall stemmed from its focus on its product rather than the experience its product enabled.

Originally, Kodak had it right. Its “Kodak Moments” was a genius marketing term for the memories people could only capture because of Kodak’s film.

Ultimately, Kodak took the nearsighted view that it was in the film business instead of the memories business. It shifted its marketing message away from enabling experiences and toward preaching the quality of its film.

Kodak lost sight of the fact that your product is not what you sell. Had Kodak not married itself so much to its belief in the strength of film and focused on people’s need for enriching experiences, we’d likely see a different company today.

Alt Text: Kodak’s valuation dropped dramatically because it did not appreciate that your product is not what you sell.

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Businesses That Got It Right

In contrast with Kodak, GoPro gets that your product is not what you sell. The word camera appears infrequently on their website body.

Instead, they talk about capturing and sharing experiences. The brand’s message is, “The world’s most versatile cameras are what we make. Enabling you to share your life through incredible photos and videos is what we do.”

Shared user content naturally gives them the opportunity to let active people know how they can get the same shot with GoPro equipment.

Alt Text: GoPro’s content of sharing freeboarding is an example of how your product is not what you sell.

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For many major companies, their products are not what you think they are. Consider:

  • Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles.
  • Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content.
  • Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.
  • Airbnb, one of the largest accommodation providers, owns no real estate.

Each brand is offering something deeper to its client base, and so can you.

If you focus on the thing you sell like Kodak did, someone will inevitably displace you. You can only succeed when you fulfill needs, adapt to the times, and understand that your product is not what you sell.

5 Tips for How To Sell Solutions the Right Way

The web allows people to come to the sales table with a wealth of knowledge. Use that to your advantage with content that presents solutions and converts with these five tips.

(Marc Wayshak of Sales Insights Lab provides helpful suggestions for sales calls:)

  1. Do research to find pain points that you are in a unique position to solve for your target audience.
  2. Isolate similarities and differences between you and your competitors to be able to differentiate yourself.
  3. Empathize with your target audience with words and lingo they can easily understand.
  4. Give away solutions for free through thought leadership in content and speaking engagements that prove your expertise and commitment.
  5. Optimize calls to action that point to you as the clear solution to your audience’s problem.

An empathy map shows how to connect with customers because your product is not what you sell.

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Going deeper than products to understand, empathize with, and resolve your audience’s needs leads to stronger relationships and eventually more sales. We’ve seen it firsthand at MIG.

For example, our content and testimonials don’t dig so much into how well-written our articles are. Instead, you’ll find more about brand elevation, increases in traffic and leads, and higher rankings – the things our clients care about.

It’s all simply because we know that “your product is not what you sell.”

Work With Marketing Pros Who Understand That Your Product Is Not What You Sell

When your product is not what you sell, you have to rely on great content marketing. So, how do you find the time to create posts that accomplish that goal?

At MIG, we can help you produce outstanding content. Let’s chat about how our Content Builder Services help you sell more than your product.

The challenges related to tracking, targeting, and optimization have increased during the past couple of years. And yet, Meta has a solution that is sitting right in front of them. Meta needs to leverage Outbound Clicks.

This isn’t a particularly complex concept. Even the simplest application could be a huge help for advertisers looking to send traffic to their stuff — whether it’s on a website they own or a third-party website.

In this post, we’ll cover the obstacles these advertisers currently face, what Outbound Clicks are, and how they could be leveraged for the advertiser’s benefit.

The Problem

There are a couple of groups of advertisers who could benefit from an expansion of Outbound Clicks.

1. Advertisers who sell on a third-party website. This is one of the most frustrating places to be. If you can’t use your pixel, you aren’t able to track results, optimize for a conversion, or target those who clicked on your ad.

2. Advertisers who are heavily impacted by iOS 14+. If a large percentage of your audience consumes your content while on an iOS device, tracking opt-outs could significantly impact your reporting, optimization, and retargeting.

Outbound Clicks aren’t going to solve all of these advertisers’ problems, but they can absolutely help — assuming Meta leverages them properly.

Outbound Clicks

Before we get to how Meta could leverage Outbound Clicks, it’s important that we explain what they are — and how they’re different from other metrics. Let’s define the various “Click” metrics that are often confused.

Clicks (All): This includes ALL clicks on your ad (like it says). So, link clicks, clicks to your page profile, post reactions, comments, shares, clicks to expand media to full screen, clicks to take action (liking your page or RSVP for an event), and more. Everything.

This also applies to CPC (All) and CTR (All). If you’re following these metrics, you’re looking at total engagement on your ad, and not just clicks on a link to the thing you’re promoting.

Link Clicks: This is the number of clicks on links within the ad that lead to advertiser-specified destinations, on or off Meta technologies. While links away from Facebook are included in these clicks, it can also include clicks to open other experiences within the ad, like click-to-call, click-to-message, lead forms, playable experiences, and more.

This also applies to CPC (Cost Per Link Click) and CTR (Link Click-Through Rate).

Outbound Clicks: The number of clicks that take people away from the Meta family of apps. This includes clicks on links in the displayed ad as well as links to external websites and apps within Instant Experiences, lead forms, and collections.

Landing Page Views: The number of times someone clicked on your ad link and successfully loaded a page of your website with the Meta pixel. This is an Outbound Click, but to a website with your pixel that successfully loads.

Of course, the most valuable of these click metrics for advertisers would be the Landing Page View. We know that someone clicked on our ad, was redirected to our website, and the website loaded. But, of course, this may not be an option if you are sending someone to a website where your pixel doesn’t exist (like Amazon).

Remarketing Solution

As discussed earlier, one of the most annoying challenges for an Amazon seller, for example, is that they can’t target those who clicked their ad and went to Amazon. Their pixel isn’t on Amazon, so a Website Custom Audience wouldn’t be possible.

Let’s say that you have an initial prospecting ad that promotes your product, sending them to Amazon. How do you remarket to those who initially engaged with that ad? Right now, your options are limited. If you used a video, you could target those who watched that video. You could also target a Page Engagement custom audience, which allows you to reach anyone who has clicked on any post or ad. That’s not ideal either.

But, what about a custom audience based on Outbound Clicks? It wouldn’t matter whether your pixel exists on the external website. You could target anyone who clicked on your ads to an external website.

The Page Engagement custom audience was too broad. This limits those clicks to outbound clicks.

Of course, it would be nice to add even further granularity. What if, when creating these audiences, you could select the ads or URLs that you used for these posts or ads? Then you could create audiences based on the specific website pages people went to after clicking your ad.

It would work a lot like the current website custom audience based on URL…

Website custom audience by URL

This could also, potentially, help advertisers who have a high concentration of iOS users who have opted out of tracking. Meta is super unclear about how opt-outs impact targeting (only that these audiences will be smaller), but I assume this to mean that a user who opts out of tracking will no longer be included in website custom audiences.

But, of course, opt-outs do not apply to activity on the Facebook platform. So, an Outbound Click could conceivably be used as the source for a targeting audience.

Optimization Solution

If you’re selling a product on Amazon, you can’t optimize for a conversion because your pixel doesn’t exist there. You also can’t optimize for Landing Page Views for the same reason. Your primary option, if traffic is your goal, is Link Clicks.

Link Click Optimization

What if you could also optimize for Outbound Clicks? This would assure that Meta’s ad systems are looking specifically for people who will click out to an external website or app.

Now, the difference between Link Clicks and Outbound Clicks (discussed above) is subtle, but wouldn’t it make sense to offer an option to optimize for Outbound Clicks? Especially if your ad includes other experiences that could be counted as a Link Click but not an Outbound Click, it would certainly help the advertiser get the specific actions they want.

Your Turn

Do you think Outbound Clicks could be used to fill some holes for advertisers? What other solutions would you add?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How Meta Could Leverage Outbound Clicks appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.