Image credit: MildlyDiverting
With all the buzz about social media, inbound marketing and associated fashionable terms, it is useful to remind ourselves that Marketing 1.0 still has a place. That cumbersome, promotion-heavy, old-school way of marketing your wares isn’t dead yet.
Perhaps it is best explained by the fact that ‘You are not your target’.
I’m reminded of this particularly by a company I have worked with for a few years. They sell compatible ink cartridges. Their site isn’t a virtual community, it doesn’t provide opportunities for customers to communicate with each other on forums, any testimonials on the site are vetted from submissions in emails. The site design is functional, their on-page adverts and the newspaper campaigns they’re often based on won’t be winning any advertising awards for style, yet they are massively effective.
The majority of their business comes from large scale email shots to existing customers highlighting special purchase items and giving BoGoF promo codes for compatible ink cartridges – repeat business is the core of their success and is responsible for the lion’s share of their turnover. New customer acquisition is primarily via national press advertising, followed by the ‘tell-a-friend’ programme; a powerful combination of traditional marketing promotion and souped-up, incentivised word-of-mouth.
Without the old-world medium of national newspapers, they wouldn’t be able to reach their target market and grow their customer base. Their targets are not web-savvy comparison shoppers (because there’s always someone out there with a lower price), it’s people who still buy newspapers rather than read them for free online and are hooked by a ‘buy one get one free’ deal at prices that beat the OEMs into a cocked hat already.
To sum up, if you’re marketing a product that has a broad appeal, you have to accept that not all of your potential customers will be people like you. Understanding your customer isn’t just about gut feeling, it’s about research too. Get out there and meet your customers, meet people who could be your customers and don’t ignore the old-school methods of reaching these groups, just because it’s not hip or trendy.
