By John Eberhard
I started doing marketing in 1989. I know. That was before there was an Internet, though younger people today probably don’t believe there even was a time when there was no Internet.
But it’s true. Back in 1989 I took a job as a Marketing Director for a market research company. I didn’t even know anything about marketing, except that I was a pretty good writer, I liked the idea of sending out a communication that reached thousands of people, and I was pretty good with computers. So I learned on the job.
We bought mailing lists of the target business public we were selling to (which arrived in the mail on floppy disks), and sent them letters with certain data mail-merged into the letters. And the owner of the company happened to be a master salesman, and he wrote some of the letters and the letters did pretty well.
Then I went to work for a software company, first in charge of market research surveys (once again learning on the job), then being in charge of the whole marketing division of up to 8 people. We did very complete surveys of the target public, came up with great campaigns, and then ran those campaigns in big ads in trade publications, in direct mail, in card decks, and in booths at trade shows. That was in the early nineties, and I remember another guy who worked there did a presentation for the marketing group and described something called “search engines,” and I thought that was the most hilarious phrase I’d ever heard.
At the next company I worked for, we used direct mail, and also sent sales faxes. And that was really cool because you could write something today and send it out today, which certainly wasn’t the case with direct mail or ads (where you had to wait days or weeks for the message to reach the public).
In the late nineties I worked for another software company, and around 1999 we started doing email marketing. And we made millions for that company doing email marketing. We rented email lists from list rental companies. What this meant was that you would create the email and send it to them and they’d send it out to their lists. You never took possession of the list.
And we did really well with that. I was told by a rep from one of the list rental companies that our emails got better response than anything else he had ever seen. We were pretty innovative with it. We’d attach an MP3 file that would play when the person opened the email. We made emails using Flash. We offered free gifts like a “free report” or a free software demo.
And we got plenty of responses and built up our email list like nobody’s business. And we had a programmer build us an autoresponder series, so when someone responded, they would receive a series of emails selling them the product which they bought online.
We also built a great website and had an affiliate program and by the end of my time there, we were making $50,000 a month just in online sales.
Next I worked for a realtor and that was the first time I set up and managed Google Ads campaigns, and we were getting actual leads for under a dollar apiece, quite a bit less than what you’d pay today for a lead from any campaign on Google.
Next I worked for an insurance claims company, and there we did email, direct mail, and had several websites. This was where I first did search engine optimization, and before long we were ranking pretty well for the keywords we were targeting. And I wrote an article about a certain type of insurance (entitled “Who (Almost) Murdered the Program,” that used the concept of the “Clue” game), that ended up getting published as a cover story in the one of the biggest trade journals in the insurance industry.
Shortly thereafter I started Real Web Marketing, servicing clients all over the country with web design, SEO, pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and eventually video production and marketing.
So during that span we’ve gone from direct mail and trade journal advertising, to email and the web, to Google Ads and Facebook advertising. And today’s marketing has many challenges that we sure didn’t have back in 1989.
But the constants over that time have been:
- Finding out what the target public wants, and what their problems are that you can solve
- Finding a marketing media or platform that you can use to reach them
- Creating a campaign and sending it out
- Carefully tracking results
- Making adjustments based on the results
Despite all the so-called marketing gurus claiming everything has changed you’ve got to buy their course or book, those things above have not changed.
If you want help with any marketing issue, contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
