Every once in a while it's fun to reminisce about how marketing used to be. Remember how internet marketing was before the time of social media?When you basically had newsgroups, chat rooms, webpages and email to work with. There wasn't even Google for research purposes. I worked on a team with Lou Pearlman and proved that, with the right organization, we could make internet marketing work. A lot has changed, but the basic four principles are the same: use the latest available technology, create a database, create relevant communication, and build brands. You could apply that to condo project marketing or real estate project sales today. Let's review how I applied these principles back in the day, to a then-new group of guys who had yet to sell an album.
- We started an online promotion through newsgroups and chat groups. Lou knew what I knew, that our target market (teenage girls) had figured out this new technology before anybody else. Our promotion is what you could easily set up on Facebook or LinkedIn today, but we had to work from scratch.
- We created a database of 3.5 million teenage girls worldwide. We organized it country by country. If translated to project marketing language today, this would be our accumulation of leads who volunteered information to us through our automated email system.
- We set up a system to send targeted emails to our leads which were very relevant to them. Each time a girl registered on our site we asked them who their favourite member was. If they said AJ, for example, their emails would only come from AJ. If they were from Berlin, we only sent messages when the band was arriving at an airport in Berlin or playing a show there, and that email would come from each individual lead's favourite band member. We even had follow-up emails when the favourite member inevitably couldn't meet the girl like he said he would because things were so crazy.
- We built a brand. We had a call to action: the message would ask the girl to request the band's song on a radio station. This drove number-one songs in every market we went into and created a demand. We had a sales system in place ready to respond to this demand and moved over a billion dollars in merchandise.
This four-step process continues to work as a guideline for internet marketing. However, the game has changed because social media and mobile browsing have taken off. My marketing agency N5R remains on top of the situation and always ready to roll with the new rules. If you would like to read more about our approach to project marketing, just click below for your free chapter of my new ebook. You can find the full version of It's Not The Market, It's Your Marketing on Amazon.ca.
