Many years ago I used to do “real world” marketing. This was before the internet really took off. Before anyone heard of google or there were any internet marketing guru’s.
Many people try to make it like online marketing is so totally different than marketing is in the “real world.” Not true at all. Yes there is new technology, new terminology, but many of the basics remain the same.
Here is an example of a real world marketing campaign I worked on and then I equate each step to online marketing.
The Marketing Campaign:
Placing an advertisement for the Hotel Wolcott in NYC with the goal of getting more customers to stay there during a certain month.
There were 5 main steps
1) Choose the target market: people traveling to new york city that are looking for budget hotels.
online equivalent: There is nothing different here at all. You choose a target market online that you are going to focus your marketing campaign towards.
2) Find the market: It was decided to run an ad in Arthur Frommers Budget Travel magazine. This is a magazine with a very large audience that would have a readers that were perfectly in our target market.
online equivalent: Where does your target market hangout? A well known site you can buy an advertisement on? Or maybe a site that allows you to place google placement ads on that website? Or the ever popular…what searches are your target market typing into search engines.
3) Budget the ad: I forgot exactly how much we were allowed to spend on the ad, but with the figure we were given we could choose the size of the ad we could run. Bigger sizes cost more, color ads cost more, etc.
online equivalent: Just like different ads cost different prices in the real world, the same goes for the online world. Different websites will charge varying amounts according to the traffic they get as well as where the ad is on a page (higher up usually costs more). If you are going to run a ppc ad, perhaps you don’t have enough of a budget to target all the keywords you want. You must choose the ones you think will be the most profitable
3) Create the ad/offer: This would deal with the graphic design and copywriting of the ad itself. Of course the ad followed the rules of good copywriting – Grab their attention, tell them the benefits of staying at the wolcott , etc. As for the layout of the ad – it was created to be easy to spot, read and understand. This is not always the case with many advertisements.
online equivalent: there is a ton of material devoted to writing advertisements that convert including headlines, ads, classified ads and even banner ads.
4) Track the results – a “service code” is inserted into the ad, near the telephone number so when people call to book a room, they give the “service code”. This is a tracking device and let’s us know they are booking the room because of the ad we ran. It gives a fairly accurate count of how profitable the ad was. If was profitable we know it can be ran again to earn more profits. If it does not make a profit, we know to either change the ad, run it somewhere else, or scrap it altogether.
online equivalent: This is a step that many people don’t take as seriously as they should. In online marketing, actually in direct response marketing of any type, you must track your ads. That’s what direct response marketing means. You can track directly if the ad made a profit. If you do not track you are just playing a guessing game and are doomed to throw money away.
Internet marketing is not hard. Much of it is simply a numbers game.
Regards,
Ethan Semmel
