Does your online marketing stink?
Many online marketers succeed in spite of themselves…
They’ll have a half-decent idea… For a half-decent product… And a half-decent business…
And yet they’ll be doing really well financially.
Or at least, staying afloat as a business, when, without the internet, they would have sunk long ago.
What gives?
It’s called economics.
The economics of the internet are what completely changed the game versus everything that came before.
Let’s look at one example… Video.
Let’s say, pre-internet, that you wanted to package up your sales pitch in a video format, and put it in front of your customers.
You could spend tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on recording an infomercial and testing it to a large enough sample audience to figure out if it was going to pull.
Or you could record the pitch and copy it to VCR tapes (then eventually CD-ROM) and send those out by mail to your prospects.
Either way represented enormous time and expense to reach your target market.
Today? Grab your cell phone, hit record, and you have the video. Click “upload” and it’s on YouTube. Post it to Facebook, or send it out via free email.
It used to be a commitment of at least a few thousand dollars before you could put a video marketing message in front of the FIRST prospect… And to get any sort of scale, you were investing tens-of-thousands at a MINIMUM.
Today — once you have the smart phone and the internet connection — there is ZERO incremental cost to put your video marketing message in front of your first prospect, your first hundred, or your first thousand.
Sure, there are ways you can spend money to be more targeted, or do it faster, but it’s still WAY cheaper than it ever was in offline media.
Another example… Follow-up marketing for prospects and leads.
Let’s say, pre-internet, that you get a new lead calling your sales department, inquiring about your products.
You can, of course, answer their call, answer their questions, and do your pitch on the phone. You’re probably paying long-distance fees, because they probably called your 800 number.
Then, to send them more information, you’re printing brochures and follow-up pieces. You’re stuffing them in an envelope. And you’re paying first-class postage to get it to them.
For your sales team to follow up, you’re again paying long-distance charges, making additional phone calls to close the deal.
You can also send out info via fax, at ten cents a page. Or the much-more-expensive FedEx, if you’re feeling like you really want to stand out.
Today, you can put a ton of information on your website. Or, in automated email follow-up sequences.
You don’t have to spend a dime to reconnect and continue to send unlimited marketing messages. And if you do it right, you don’t have to lift a finger, either.
Oh, and if you DO want to call prospects, you can call around the world for free, via all sorts of voice apps and internet phone services.
The examples are endless — the cheap economics of the internet changed everything…
In direct mail, you spend $500 per thousand prospects — or more — to simply get in front of them one time.
Online, you’re spending $1 per thousand — if that — for your first exposure.
What this means is that marketing that could NEVER be profitable at $500 per thousand is suddenly wildly so with the cheaper media provided by the internet.
Bad marketing dies fast in offline media — unless the company is too big and too dumb to notice that their marketing doesn’t work.
But online, bad marketing can continue to thrive, because it’s so cheap to keep doing it.
It took discipline to become great at marketing offline — because if you didn’t have discipline, the market would chew you up and spit you out.
You HAD TO know how to produce profits at much stingier economics, or you’d be broke, fast.
Online, you can get away with a TON less discipline, because the economics of reaching your market are so heavily in your favor.
WARNING: This condition will not last forever…
Air time for infomercials used to be free. It’s true. After the station had officially signed off for broadcasting for the evening, the air time was thought to be worth nothing. So the earliest infomercials were given air time for free or a nominal charge, because there was no perceived value. It was incredibly easy to make a profitable infomercial. A few sales, and you were in the black.
Today, infomercial air time has gotten so expensive, only the best of the best can compete. Even with cable and the proliferation of channels and target markets, you need a really good show, or you’re going broke, fast. Many infomercials are only profitable today because there’s a chain of upsells for buyers of the first products, and add-on sales online and in retail support mediocre on-air results.
The same thing will happen online.
While the internet has fundamentally changed the access to media, there will continue to be preferred media channels that make it easy to reach your target market.
These will continue to grow more expensive. Bad marketing that worked because of really good economics will fail in the face of increasing costs of reaching customers.
Email, now postage-free, will probably eventually cost money to send.
The same skills that were required to be a leader in direct mail will continue to be more and more essential for real online success.
This is why it pays to study history. This is why it pays to study the greats of ALL eras, not just the hotshots of today who have whatever nouveau chic marketing channel is hot now all figured out.
My friend Brian Kurtz has a saying, that “$1 per thousand marketing deserves $500 per thousand thinking.” Folks who want to be successful today and build that success well into the future will take that to heart.
If you want direct marketing principles, strategies, and tactics that succeed as well in $500 per thousand offline media as well as $1 per thousand online media, you need the DVDs from the Titans of Direct Response.
And remember that when you order by midnight tomorrow — using my link below — you not only get all the bonuses Brian is offering, but also the recordings from my copywriting workshop, free.
Click here to get the Titans DVDs…
When you complete your order, let me know, and I’ll send you your download link.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets
