Old School vs. New School Direct Marketing or

FUSION MARKETING?

Old school direct marketing is using sales reps, cold-calling, flyers, and anything else including FAX machines to spread the word of your campaign.

New school direct marketing is direct email marketing, social media marketing, websites, and anything else that flies through the web in or even out of the office.

Old school direct marketing is seen as expensive.

For example here, is an actual case study.

Old school direct marketing team wages

• £65,000 - £115,000 for a marketing director

• £24-£35,000 for other members of a marketing team.

It isn’t uncommon for me to go and meet a team of twelve people working in a marketing office or suite.!One client I have was spending over £230,000 on wages for his marketing team.

One client I have was spending over £230,000 on wages for his marketing team.

Direct mail can cost as low as £1 per letter or as high as you want to go. I worked on one direct mailer that cost around £25,000 to send 10,000 letters. I also worked on another that was costing over £1,000,000 per month.

If you take the back of a Sunday magazine and place your advert there it will cost you around £70-£100k for a full-page glossy advert.

New school direct marketing is seen as cheap and fast.

Email marketing to click and send – free!

SMS marketing to click and send – free!

Social media marketing is free to set up!

Web pages can now be free to set up!

And most of the time you don’t have to have a team you can do it all yourself.

What would you choose old or new direct marketing?

The truth!

Why is it I see and meet more old school marketers that are rich and successful and many less online marketers that are hardly making a penny?

The reason is simpler than you might be thinking and then I will tell you what I prefer and advise you to do.

THE WEB OR INTERNET MARKETING PROBLEM

Web marketers usually try to do everything themselves. They sit with laptops in cafes, on a sofa or even on a beach (how they do that with sun glare is beyond me) and try to do everything themselves.

They can email offers endlessly, SMS to death and more yet the reality is most web marketers that I have met over the past 2-years and more struggle to make ends meet.

Why?

They fail to work out some very simple formulas and data.

• Return on investment

• Customer acquisition cost

• Breakeven vs. lifetime value

• And the biggest cost of all – time!

If you have no idea what your time is worth you’ll run around like a headless chicken trying and hoping something will work at some point.

Most online marketers believe that if they simply keep throwing it out there something will come back in.

Here’s another critical thing to think about.

• Not all of your targets are on Facebook

• Not all of your clients like social media

• Not all of your clients use email

• Not all of your clients feel good about SMS into their space.

Coke a cola invested a year's marketing budget into social media rather than old school media they have been running for decades. The result was a 5% drop in market share. For a company as large as coke that was huge. They now stick strictly to what they know.

Recently I did a trade show in Manchester. There were over 7000 businesspeople at this event. Almost every conversation was the same and went a little like this.

We use mostly Facebook and LinkedIn. When asked about results again the response was mostly the same… not good!

At the same event, I spoke to a guy that does just direct mail and nothing online. I asked him about his results and his reply was similar. He told me his response was very good, business was just fine but his costs for marketing were just far too high.

So what’s the answer?

It’s easier than you think but it needs you to have a re-set of your mind and marketing actions to make it work.

READ FIVE POWERFUL DIRECT MARKETING CASE STUDIES

FUSION MARKETING

I call it FUSION. It’s always been part of my AFS METHOD and has proved itself time and time again for my clients.

Let's take a step back a little.

You can send a simple direct mail/flyer/postcard to a home at a low rate. It can start with a number as low as 25 houses. This is what I call part of a seeding strategy and a warm-up strategy. It’s also very old school. You would send a number of these, not just one! One send will do nothing!

After the campaign starts you then support that with a more guerilla style campaign. What does this mean? It means you need to get more information about the household so you again set up a way to do that using old school guerilla style marketing.

Once that is in place you can support this with a more visual marketing in the local area. This can be done through THE placement of Ads where your marketplace will see these ads. They must be very simple and direct using triggers and buzzwords that apply to your customer.

Hang on in here don’t stop reading I will explain everything and why it applies to your business in a second.

At the same time, everything you do is fully supported with an online campaign using proven Facebook tricks and other social media tricks that have already been tested to work. There is more but I don’t want to complicate it for you right now.

Recently we ran a campaign for a client using just that very method. Everything was tested and eventually put together in a fusion campaign supported by my AFS METHODOLOGY. Not only were his results good his response went up by 1,700% in a single day! He was happy because not only was his failed marketing for the past 2-years now fixed he was also making money.

Let me share a short story with you about a client that was so fixed the results for him were disastrous.

This client had cash from investors. The investors were Russians. These guys are tough. They asked and paid for my advice. I put forward a plan for them that would do the following.

• Use low cost-high-return guerilla marketing

• Create a distinctive USP that really did stand out

• A fusion marketing plan that had been carefully planned through for cost and return

• A system that put their core message back into the minds of their buyers

And so much more

They had invested 4-weeks of my time into this plan.

At the same time, I didn’t realise they were also talking and asking for advice from an ad agency.

The agency put together a very predictable plan.

Focus on the logo/brand and do as much social media as possible. They would buy likes and hire cheap labour in the Philippines to post content daily.

I was dead set against that whole plan.

A solid return on investment hadn’t been worked out

An acquisition cost hadn’t been thought through

No consideration of any kind of outcome was in place. They were simply told that they would get the message out there.

They asked my thoughts and I told them blunt it is a plan with failure written all over it.

Why?

They had failed to plan and hence planned to fail!

18 months later I received an email from the director. He apologised for what happened at the time and told me the company had folded and that he wished he had stuck to my directions.

The problem is this.

They were too fixated on a single plan of action and the world of marketing is now very different.

You have to be smarter, you have to be clever, you have to think, you have to plan and you have to minimise risk. Never before has the opportunity to so that been greater.

Are you doing fusion marketing?

Are you stuck on trying everything and anything online?

Are using just cold-calling?

Are you knocking on doors and doors only?

Are you running the same ads for the past 3-years just hoping they might work?

Are you doing just one email every month and hope that email will get sales?

Whatever it is you are doing today you need to get smarter.

The world has changed and the world of marketing has transformed.

Yes, Facebook might be telling you how to take your business to market in a step-by-step fashion. Yes, Google is doing the very same.

Yet are they showing you how o get smart, how to position, how to close deals, how to create scripts, how to build trigger sequences or how to sit and strategize and put together a smart fusion system that is measured and capable of actually increasing your sales?

The future of marketing is very different from just old school or just new school direct marketing. Truly it even goes beyond fusion. The future of marketing is built around very careful smart thinking that we supported by planning, systems and testing.

If you like the idea of working alongside and installing my AFS METHOD into your life and business you know how to get me.

And just so you know.

Here at Orange Beetle I am making some huge changes to keep in harmony with the marketplace. Those changes include my fee or your investment with me and I can tell you my fees won’t be going down quite the opposite.

So now is a golden opportunity to either work at my side as a mentor protégé, have me rebuild or fine-tune your entire marketing systems or have me leverage what you have to give you more of what you need.

Do you want me?

You know exactly where I am.

Just in case.

Alan Forrest Smith

Tele: 07793069486

Text: 07793069486