Google Uses Direct Mail?

Nicolette Lemmon, President/Founder

My Marketing Strategy

Nicolette Lemmon, President & Founder

With all the hype on social media and online efforts supplanting “traditional” marketing and advertising, it is hard to find anyone talking about the importance of layering both together. One blog post will be about the death of media advertising with the demise of newspapers and magazines. Then, I just saw a webcast from HP where Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, discusses the importance of giving away free content to attract business.

In wrestling with 2010 marketing plans for clients, we are trying to figure out how much emphasis should be put to targeted direct marketing and how much to online efforts? Is it enough to just start pushing online and social media solutions?

I received a direct mail piece from Google promoting Adwords TM. Isn’t that interesting considering we have an Adwords account –online!

So, was it crazy for them to use direct mail? The intent of the piece was to draw agency principals into considering Adwords. There was an invitation to view a webinar tailored to agencies.

It did catch my attention. And receiving their invitation by snail mail to go online to view some beneficial information encouraged me to consider their webinar.

We still need to include a variety of traditional to reinforce the value of the brand as well as adding new social media or online efforts to provide more engagement.

Where do you weigh in? Do you think next year’s marketing plans should abandon direct mail and other traditional marketing solutions or do you believe in the layered approach? I’d love to hear your opinion!

4 thoughts on “Google Uses Direct Mail?

  1. You’re right, Steve, about the value of target marketing. Datamining is incredibly important in today’s marketing plans to profile and track the results of targeted marketing efforts. Especially key is the ability to finetune lead generation by sending targeted offers to drive sales. Marketers must stay focused on solutions that achieve the corporate goals!

  2. Eschewing traditional marketing channels for social media is a dead end and the large financial institutions know it. While they may dabble in social media, their biggest inroads are being made by using more sophisticated data to model and target potential customers directly. Big banks continue to gain market share not by chatting up their customers, but by targeting prospects with offers that seem to always be a bit better than yours. Layer if you like, but at the end of the day… you have to sell something.

  3. In addition to layering direct mail and social media, we should not forget mobile banking and the opportunities to reach our early adapters where they live (so to speak) Lots of high tech users don’t want us (as financial institutions)to be their friend and follow them- but they do want to be able to reach us when they need us. Having the phone, air plan and lifestyle that mobile banking requires usually opens our doors to the type of member that we are seeking for sustained growth. We can use mobile banking as a touch point to cement our relationship with them.

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