Are You Missing Huge Profit Opporunities?

Not long ago I was speaking at an event here in London run by Perry Marshall, the Adwords wizard.

Not surprisingly, nearly all the attendees were on-line marketers.

I asked them some questions: “Do any of you watch TV? Go to the movies? Read newspapers? Magazines?”

Everyone said, “Yes.”

So I replied, “So do your customers.”

They got the point.

You shouldn’t rely on just one medium – because your customers don’t.

Many people ask me, should we use e-mail or direct mail? It shouldn’t be a question of either/or.  The answer should be both – and the question is, when to use which one?

Nor should you rely on one marketing weapon alone.  It is as though you were a general in a war who had infantry but no artillery or tanks.

Which weapons to choose?

There are plenty out there.

Some will be more appropriate than others. Here is a list of 16 I gave to the delegates:

Research

Advertising

PR

Point of Sale

Sales Promotion

Sponsorship

Product placement

Guerrilla

Word of mouth

Sales people

Direct Marketing Online

Direct Marketing Offline

Experiential

Packaging

Your job, if you wish to be as effective as you can be, is to understand what all these weapons do – and when to apply them.

If you are using research, but your competitor isn’t, you know more – and that gives you a huge advantage. If you are using PR and your competitor isn’t, that gives you another huge advantage.

How I built a business

At the Perry Marshall seminar a delegate from Brazil asked me a question about building a brand.

My partners and I built the best-known direct marketing agency in the U.K. from a minus position (we were all in debt) by using several weapons, mostly NOT direct marketing.

We ran events, wrote articles, made speeches, offered free booklets about direct marketing – and I wrote two books.

We held amazing parties in famous places like Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks Museum.

And we advertised.

Have you noticed that advertising agencies hardly ever advertise? Do you ever wonder why?

In my experience advertising was not at all effective in getting business, but it did get us known as a serious firm, which was a great benefit when I came to sell the business to Ogilvy & Mather .

But we did hardly any diredt marketing, even though that was our speciality. Only one direct mail campaign and a telephone follow-up in the 7 years before I sold the business.

But our agency was so well known that 11 years after we went out of business we were still appearing among the top 15 agencies people would choose to give their business to.

The Bare Essentials of Marketing in 60 minutes

Do YOU understand marketing – really?

At the Perry Marshall event I asked people what they would like me to talk about. Most people said they’d like to know how to plan and carry out a marketing program.

So I created a one hour talk on just that.

It starts by defining marketing, then looks at how you compete better, what matters most (and why people get their priorities wrong).  All complete with 18 relevant examples – one of which is a letter that took $2.75 million off just 1500 customers.

People liked it so much that they stayed till nearly three hours after the official seminar ending.

So now I have turned my speech into a webinar. It is free.

Would that interest you? If so, just send an email saying “Marketing” to Drayton@draytonbird.com and I’ll tell you where to go.

Just that one word will do – and I’ll tell you more….

– Drayton