How To Use Demarketing To Drive More Leads From Your Blog

Marketing your business online takes all kinds of time, effort and skills. In the past companies and blogs could get away with focusing all their efforts on one primary channel but as competition increases sites who want to remain a top need to adopt an omnichannel approach to marketing and communications. 

If omnichannel is where digital marketing is moving towards, then content marketing will be the platform or the glue that brings a successful omnichannel strategy together.

Reaching out to customers with various levels of intent or stage of the purchase cycle means you will be getting different users to your site and they all will need different messaging to try and get them to convert. Businesses who employ a content strategy often only look at talking up the product and its benefits and while this may work for a particular interest group its not for everyone. 

Sometimes taking an alternative approach can be useful in you your content marketing mix, one way to mix up your content appeal is to make use of demarketing. Creating content that caters to various ranges of thought can help you attract users with different intentions but who could still make use of the products or services you provide. 

Tip! If you feel demarketing does not suit your business or you think it would detract from your products and offerings then perhaps you should look at mid-funnel content marketing approach or a B2B content marketing strategy.

What is demarketing?

Coined by Phillips Kotler and Sidney Levy, Demarketing was defined as the conscious efforts made by a company to encourage consumers to reduce consumption of a product.

Webster’s dictionary says that demarketing is

“The use of advertising to decrease demand for a product that is in short supply.”

However, this is a very narrow definition and demarketing is actually any attempt that is made to discourage consumers from buying a certain product or service. So how does telling people not to use your service get them to use your service? The art is in how you present it of course. 

When should you use demarketing?

Demarketing has often been used rather abruptly as the last measure due to scarcity or to avoid legal action. We've seen aggressive demarketing campaigns in the energy and alcohol industry but these are more extreme cases. Demarketing can be employed subtly and elegantly to inform customers and allow the reader to convince themselves of your product or service.

Demarketing can be applied to various situations such as:

• If your product or service is highly complex
• If your product or service can result in physical damage
• If your product or service is not available in a specific area due to a certain local or national laws
• If your product has cheaper generic alternatives
• If your product or service requires a level of oversight

How to create demarketing content?

Think of how detractors of your product and service would think. Why would they not use their buy from you? Is it too expensive then speak about the exclusivity aspect. If they think they can do it by themselves speak about the subtle complexities and time-saving aspects. Approach your demarketing content as a way to sell your product or service by telling the user their frame of thought is correct but provide them with key considerations on why they should still go against their better judgement. 

If you're struggling to come to terms with the subtle art of demarketing, let me illustrate using an example of how we at nichemarket make use of demarketing.

Example:

Our blog is filled with hundreds of posts regarding marketing and how to do things yourself. Our most popular DIY posts are those around using Google Manager. Many of our readers are marketers and would understand how to use the instructions we provide. However, there are times when small business owners come across our content and feel the set up is too complex and would rather request we provide the tracking on their behalf. On other occasions, marketers would contact us because a standard solution we provide in our post simply won't suit their website and require a custom solution, which of course we are happy to provide. 

In both cases, the user had the intent to do the work themselves but the content allowed them to sell our service to themselves instead of us trying to convince them why we are the best service provider. 

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Recommended reading

If you found this post helpful and have a few more minutes to spare, then head deeper down the rabbit hole with the following articles:

• How to craft the perfect blog post
• 10 Tips That Will Set You Apart From Other Bloggers Online
• How To Turn Your Blog Into A Business
• How Your Business Website Can Benefit From a Blog
• 8 Headline Formulas That Drive Most Viral Blog Posts
• Ensure your blog is The Cat's Pyjamas before you hit publish

Tags: demarketing , content marketing , blogging