[ad-ver-tahy-zing] noun
1. the act or practice of calling public attention to one's product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.: to get more customers by advertising.
2. paid announcements; advertisements.
3. the profession of planning, designing, and writing advertisements.
<strong>mar·ket·ing </strong> [mahr-ki-ting] noun
1. the act of buying or selling in a market.
2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.
<p style="text-align: right"><em>Source – Dictionary.com</em></p>
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Advertising is one of many activities in a marketing campaign. And advertising without a complete marketing campaign is a waste of money. It simply doesn't make sense to spend advertising dollars without careful consideration for the product, the offer, the competition, the pricing, the sales techniques of the people answering the phone or following up on inquiries, and the follow up process. Many companies don't even capture contact information for inquiries – if people don't buy immediately, they don't make any attempt to keep in contact with them.
We don't have an issue with this particular company. They just happen to be unlucky enough to have hit my "pet peeve" on the wrong day – using terminology for advertising and marketing indiscriminately, and <em><strong>implying that mass advertising is all you have to do to sell a product, </strong></em>which is doing a disservice to businesspeople in this economy.
We tell our clients not to send more emails than they are willing to respond to personally. It's good business to be willing to spend the time with potential clients if you're going to insist on taking up THEIR time with your advertisement, the least you can do is sign your own name, have replies to an address in your own company domain, and make sure every inquiry is followed up by a human being. If you're unwilling to spend the time responding to replies to you're message, then <em><strong>you're sending spam to people you don't care about.</strong></em> This is not an ideal projection of your company image, and can be against the law (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003">CAN-SPAM act of 2003</a> restricts the use of unsolicited emails as advertising.)
The first step in planning a marketing campaign is to figure out how best to reach your ideal target market. It takes some pretty rigorous study to come up with a good list – and highly targeted is much better than broadcasting.
The second step is to figure out how best to reach those people multiple times in multiple ways – including a variety of media that take the strengths and weakness of each medium into account.
The third is to designing a good response offer.
In addition to the first three steps, it is also necessary to ensure you have trained sales and customer service personnel, a good sales presentation, a closing technique, and a follow up program. Without having completed these steps, it is likely that you'll have low response rate and very low (if any) sales.
Sending 70,000 emails may be a component in a properly planned marketing campaign, but it is certainly not, by itself, "Marketing Done Right."
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