Internet Direct Marketing Tip of the Day

Online or offline, a marketing campaign that asks for the sale is called a direct response campaign. Twitter has hundreds of feeds that offer deals on everything you can think of, and then some. Blow-out deals or clearance deals are a natural commercial use for Twitter and other forms of SocMed.

Twitter is a good channel for Customer Relationship Marketing, which is also a subset of Direct Marketing. Many B2B sales relationships can take 12-18 months before resulting in an actual sale.

Direct Marketers of many disciplines are used to having direct contact with their audiences. Cataloguers and Membership Clubs are built on this model. So, put your Direct Marketing glasses on when you approach Social Media Marketing. While you’re wearing those Direct Marketing glasses, don’t forget to consistently test new things out and watch the response rates. Remember too, that some SocMed efforts don’t pay off right away. Some campaigns can take months to propagate or “go hot,” as they say. LC

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Paid search is about to go through major changes. The extent of change has yet to be determined. But it is already happening. Why? Because people’s search behavior is already shifting.

There are now millions of Twitter- and Facebook-specific searches rather than the traditional types of searches conducted at Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. How PPC ads perform in Real-Time Search will be one metric to watch closely.

Will people who are searching for “What’s happening right now?” rather than “I need more info on XYZ” be more or less apt to click on paid ads? Maybe certain types of paid ads will enjoy higher click-throughs than others. We’ll see.

As Search Guru Mike Grehan points out, thousands of apps totally sidestep the HTTP protocol by conducting proprietary searches. Apps such as OpenTable or CNN news alerts automatically search for news items for you.

Maybe there will be so many proprietary search apps bypassing search engines that the price of keywords in paid search will go up or down. It’s impossible to say right now, but it will be fascinating to watch this shift unfold. LC

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