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Marketing
Scams & Spam
Article
by MadamSplash
As
a sales promotion and marketing professional of some thirty
30 years (OMG!),
sometimes I shudder
with embarrassment to admit that I am.
Despite
being the
most important success science of modern Australian business, as a result
of the misuse by marketing "cowboys", marketing has achieved
a poor reputation with consumers.
Fair
Suck-of-the-Sav!
Firstly
it was the highly successful mail
drop marketing system,
which remained a relatively unthreatening medium, until the onset of
cheaper, speedier printing facilities, that boosted pamphlet production
turnaround by about 10000%.
The result was to be the merciless abuse
of urban letterboxes, until finally somebody stood up and said
"enough!". Environmentally
conscious consumers were outraged by the promotional waste. Ordinary
citizens complained about being pulverized by advertising materials that
they simply did not want.
If
you now take a suburban walk in any town, in any Australian city, you will
be privy to how virtually 30% of consumers now protect their homes from
unwanted advertising materials with a "Strictly
No Promotional Materials"
on their letter box.
Conduct
your own pamphlet drop experiment to a large apartment block with over 100
letterboxes sometime, then hang around (not too suspiciously please) until
the residents return home in the evening to check their boxes and witness the results.
You may re-think the expense of a full on mail drop campaign.
Ring
Ring - Why Don't you Buzz
Off?
Then
came Telemarketing, probably one of the most successful and enjoyable
marketing mediums I have ever worked with.
Again the medium was to be
taken up and abused by marketing consultancies who developed massive call
centres that utilized ineffective, intrusive or poor quality telemarketers
to bombard Australian homes and businesses.
Nowadays
most business owners operate "not
available to telemarketers"
policies, and home consumers actually compete with each other as to how rude
or cruel
they can be to an unsuspecting Telemarketer.
I
can hardly blame them.
Then
Along
Came Spam.
It began with email.
It was now possible to farm email addresses to send multiple marketing
communications at the touch of a button. To this day we still receive
thousands of Spam Emails, many with no sensible topic at all. There are
spam catchers, but even these can block out authentic emails.
I
recall in my earlier days of internet marketing joining special sites
where I could legitimately forward marketing emails, and would happily
churn out around 5,000 emails in a night. Until the ISP rang to tell
me his server had fallen over, because it couldn't handle my
SPAM.
Accusing
an honest marketer of being a spammer is a bit like calling them a pedophile,
so I wasn't too impressed. I (and the Splash domain) was promptly
blocked from his server for an undeterminable period of time.
Unfair but
understandable.
Search
Engine Spammers
Then
came the rush for prominence in search engine indexes.
How often have you called up a
keyword,
clicked on the first few sites to be greeted by
absolutely NOTHING at all? Something
like "would you like to advertise here" or
"we currently have no listings - here is another
list you can try"
Again, it was the Internet Marketing
Cowboys keen to show off their search engine superiority (as opposed to
brains) to use devious means to fool the search engines through the
production of countless, useless pages and websites. In some cases
the
results were not just
first placing, but up
to the first ten
spots in the index.
These web pages even showed up
in keyword results that they don't even belong.
Oh that was good
for the internet's reputation!
Link
To Me Oh Ghost
Who Walks
Finally, came the link
to me craze.
When it was suggested that the number of links you had pointing to your
website was an indication of how popular your site was, the mad rush to
get reciprocal links was
on.
Naturally,
along came John Wayne Technical
Marketing Whiz who
developed the
program that would develop thousands (and I mean thousands!) of
undetectable phantom links to your site.
So just how many web pages are
there on the internet really?
The
moral of this story about marketing
scams and spam is this ... if you
really believe you will win a potential customers trust by using
pesty,
wasteful, aggressive or devious
means - you've got
rocks in your head!
Every
success!
Source: Pauline Douglas - Simply The Best At Internet
Marketing
To
discuss your Internet Marketing needs call MadamSplash on 1800 775 244 or
(07) 4081 0244. end. |
