I wrote last month’s column about contractor media integration to help dispel the myth that online and offline are somehow separate. They’re not. The web is merely a means of message delivery, like any media. However, one element of web marketing remains profoundly different from other media. It’s also “conveniently” left out of most every web media salesperson’s pitch.
Not knowing it can be crippling to contractors. It even posed a lethal limitation to web-based sales giants such as Amazon, eBay, Pro-Active and J. Crew. Yet, they quietly “discovered” a very old-school way of exploding their profits, one you’ve already known for years but have probably been told to avoid. As a direct response marketer (meaning, focused on sales and leads, not on soft advertising results), promotions have one of two goals: