When someone asks what you do, what do you say? Do you say you’re in insurance or Medicare or fundraising or car sales? Or to you tell them that you help give people piece of mind, help them afford good medical coverage, make a difference in your community or help people live their dreams?
There’s this idea out there that marketing must always reinvent the wheel. Every time you go to create a new marketing piece, you must start from scratch, keeping the page blank and creating something wholly new every time. Not only will that notion cost you more time and money, it’ll result in a lackluster marketing campaign.
Great marketing is really, really annoying.
Sounds counter intuitive, doesn’t it? After all, you want your business to be liked. Loved, even. But the irony is, if you execute irritating marketing well, it will be.
What makes marketing irritating, you ask? It’s the kind of marketing that’s everywhere. Everywhere you turn, there’s another message worming its way into your subconscious. It’s absolutely ubiquitous. That’s what makes really great marketing: the kind you can’t escape from.
You’ve probably heard that everyone learns differently. While there are lots of different theories on learning styles and how you can slice that pie, the simplest and most common model puts us all into one of three categories: visual learners, auditory learners and bodily kinesthetic learners. While there’s obviously some overlap—no one learns in just one way—everyone naturally gravitates toward one of these styles when it comes to taking in the world around us.
Okay, but what does all this have to do with marketing? A whole lot, as it turns out. When customers are consuming your marketing material, what they’re doing is learning. They’re learning more about the problem they’re experiencing, possible solutions and yes, of course, your company. So are you marketing to hit all the different learning styles?
All marketing, but direct mail marketing in particular, is made up of two separate yet equally important aspects. First is the left-brained side, where you look at dollars and cents and demographic data. They talk about pinpointing ideal consumers and using market research to identify motives and value propositions and understand on the molecular level why people buy.
“Email is the way of the future!” “No, it’s social media!” “Your website is the center of your marketing!” “Direct mail gets responses!” Everyone, usually people selling you something, wants to tell you that their preferred marketing channel is the only way to get results. And you know what? They’re right.
“Treat all customers like your best customer!” It’s the kind of maxim that sounds great on paper, but in real life, it’s not a sustainable business model. After all, you’ve all heard that maxim that 10% of your customers take 90% of your time, right? You need to make sure they’re the right 10%. That is, the customers who are truly adding to your bottom line.
Even though you both work in the same company, sometimes it feels like sales and marketing are always fighting over what’s most important. Perhaps marketing wants to focus on bringing in very specific targets, while sales would rather have a broader base to work with and qualify later. Or maybe the two departments are presenting your product in different ways, focusing on different features and benefits.
Children. Let’s all play nicely. We’re all here for the same reasons, right? It’s time to get your sales and marketing team in the same room and make peace. Grab some coffee and a box of donuts and let’s all get on the same page, shall we?
Every day, more than 144 billion (yes, billion with a b) emails are sent. Of those, an incredibly high number are marketing emails, all trying to get you to CLICK HERE and BUY RIGHT NOW! Every day, more and more of these emails bombard potential customers.
As other methods of delivering marketing messages, like direct mail, continue to shift, more people will likely turn to email to tell their stories. “No Saturday mail?” they think, “I’ll just send an email on Saturday instead.” It sounds like a great idea when it’s just one company is doing it, but you’re not marketing in a vacuum. At any given time, other companies have the same idea and are trying to deliver the same message in the same way.
Cutting-edge social media and classic direct mail marketing don’t have anything in common—or do they? Believe it or not, direct mail and social media can both work together to feed and strengthen one another.
Even if you’re selling products and services aimed at a more senior market, like reverse mortgages or Medicare insurance supplements, chances are they’re on social media. 57% of adults over 50 use social media, while 38% of those over 65 are making use of Facebook, Twitter and other social websites. That number is set to explode in the future, so smart companies will start laying their social networking foundation today.