Sorry, but do the puny sizes of social media audiences strike you as a marketer’s dream come true? I’m not talking about total users. I’m talking about how many people actually read your blog posts, follow you on Twitter, or watch your YouTube video. Yes, we have all heard the viral success stories, but how’s it working for you? Where’s the ROI? Where are the clients? Where is the lead stream? Is anyone even listening?
There is a lot of hype about the new media. It seems everyone has fallen in love with social network marketing. As Websites, social media and blogs have taken center stage, many companies have pushed the traditional promotional channels to the wayside. Is it possible, just possible, that by switching from old-school marketing to the new media you are putting your Clydesdales out to pasture and hitching your wagon to a team of plastic ponies?
New marketing concepts rarely work as well as we imagine.
Look, I realize you can’t ignore social network marketing. I own an Internet company and I’ve written many letters imploring you to follow your customers as they migrate to the new media. But I want to be clear: Don’t give up on the tried-and-true marketing tactics while you are fiddling with the new. You need to keep a foot in both camps. And frankly, if I had only enough money to choose one, I’d choose old-school marketing over social network marketing in a heartbeat. It’s good to keep in mind that your company wasn’t built by the Internet, it was built before the Internet. Don’t forget who brought you to the dance: Promotional channels such as direct mail, publicity and a crackerjack sales staff.
We are a good company to do business with if you agree with my assessment. We sell both old- and new-school marketing services. Our flagship product is publicity. We have been arranging product publicity for more than twenty years. Nothing sparks sales better than a good old-fashioned news story that features your product. The reason publicity works so well is the media’s model for writing stories: heavy on the problem and light on the solution. If you’ve read the book Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, he advocates selling to the pain. No one is better at highlighting pain than the media. Their industry thrives on pain. And to paraphrase David Ogilvy, when you build a fire under someone’s chair, it’s much easier to sell them a fire extinguisher.
If you want to stay plugged into real mass marketing, do what hundreds of companies have done and hire us to hunt down every publicity opportunity in the U.S.. Of the four old-school promotional channels, publicity is and always has been the most powerful, the least expensive and surprisingly underutilized.
Unlike our competitors, we charge per story we arrange. Clients love the accountability. We can get your product in front of your potential customers where you can give them a nice long explanation of the frustration (pain) your product solves. Our big clients have consistently purchased around TEN MILLION publicity impressions PER MONTH for years and years! Now that’s Clydesdale power.
Call us and put us to work arranging publicity for your product. It’s the best darn mass marketing promotional channel of all time. Period.
