Everyone is Blocking Advertising Now

Does That Mean Marketing Is Dead?

No – it means bad marketing is dead. No one wants more pop-ups, more banner ads, or spam email. We’re all trying to get rid of that – including you and me!  So where do we go from here?

Sales People Need Marketing

I constantly hear sales complaints about not having enough leads. That makes sense to me.

The reseller business has largely sold without marketing over the past three decades. The manufacturers have advertised products, and VAR Sales Reps have made lots of calls. This is not marketing – at least not a form of marketing that will work in today’s market. Instead, it’s an expensive sales model that leads to high turnover.

The fact is, marketing is important and every sales person needs to embrace it. More emails and phone calls won’t attract more prospects. In fact, you might just turn them off more.

People hang up on us simply because they can’t spend the day answering telemarketing calls. I have my office phone ringer turned off. If I answered every call, I would spend half of my day talking to people about lower rates on car insurance. How much lower can it really get? If I take 15 calls, will there really be 15 rate adjustments in one single day?

Great Advertising Bring Great Insights – Or Something Really Funny

Funny ads are fun to watch. There are actually a few commercials I enjoyed watching over my life.  But they’re few and far between.

By far the best advertisements have been well written books, that offered me great content and ideas, but then led me to an offer to give me more. In some cases I was able to implement without any further purchases. In other cases, I moved from the free book or webinar, to the actual offer.

Here’s a great example – NewsletterPro.  A free book, followed by a great offer. If you have time you can just do what they say in the book. If you’d rather spend your time on selling or running a business, you can let them do it for you. (CLICK to See It In Action).

Lunch & learns, done right, are a great example of educational marketing. If you understand how to get the right audience, and you give them great insights that will help them with their current business challenges, all you need is a compelling conversion offer and you’re sales will go up.

There are other educational platforms that can work just as well. But none of them involved spam email.

© David Stelzl