Modern Challenges to Postcard Marketing

The following is an excerpt from the e-book, Postcard Marketing - A Modern Approach

Alternately, I could have labeled this section "Modern Challenges to Marketing in General" because the challenges I'm about to list apply to all marketers. But this is a book on postcard marketing, so we shall narrow our focus to that medium.

Challenge #1 - An Army of Marketers
As the postcard marketing industry continues to grow in size and advance in technologically, the cost of postcard marketing decreases for the individual marketer. There's a lot of competition in the industry, so postcard printers are always trying to add services and undercut each other's pricing. As a result, the number of postcard marketers has increased steadily over the years.

What does this mean to the average consumer? You guessed it—they have more mail in their mailboxes than ever before. That leads us to the next challenge of postcard marketing ... information overload.

Challenge #2 - Information Overload
As if your competitors weren’t enough, you also face increasing resistance from your potential customers, especially those who don't already know you. Why? Because they bring more skepticism to the table than ever before.

The average consumer gets bombarded with more than 3,000 advertisements in a given day. Magazine ads, banner ads, popup ads, direct mail, spam, billboards, TV and radio spots … it’s a blanket under which nothing can grow but skepticism and selectiveness.

We encounter more information in a single day than our grandparents encountered in a year. The result? Noise, clutter and information overload—especially on the Web. The extended result is that your audience is highly selective. They are selective in what they read, what they watch, and what they respond to.

They have become “info-savvy.”

Challenge #3 - The Info-Savvy Consumer
I put this challenge in quotes, because it's actually an opportunity as well as a challenge. But let's start with the challenging side of things:

We live and work in an information economy. Words and content have become powerful tools. They drive us forward, help us succeed, make our lives more fruitful and our businesses more profitable—when they're used properly.

Your clients and prospects know this. Accordingly, they demand more of what they read.

What do I mean by info-savvy? Let's look at an industry-specific example using real estate. Think back fifteen or twenty years. It’s 1985, and you’re a homeowner. You receive a direct mail piece from a real estate agent that says, “I’m your neighborhood real estate professional, and I’m here to help with any real estate needs you have.”

How do you research this person? How do you find out who else is a real estate professional in your neighborhood? You pick up the phone and call, that’s how. And then you’ve exposed yourself as an interested prospect. In other words, there’s no easy way to conduct research anonymously.

Now return to the present. You get the same postcard (and probably a dozen more just like it). How can you research the Realtor now?

For starters, you can type the agent’s name into a search engine like GoogleTM and see what comes up. You can visit the Realtor’s website, if it’s included on the postcard. You can even visit the Realtor’s company website to see what information is listed there.

Or, maybe you just toss the postcard aside and conduct an Internet search from scratch, perhaps by typing “Realtor +your city name” into one of the major search engines.

And while you’re at it, maybe you’ll visit HouseValues.com or Zillow.com to get a rough estimate of your home’s current value. Maybe you’ll view recent sales in the area, or maybe you’ll visit HomeBuyingInstitute.com to learn all about mortgages.

The point is, times have changed, and consumers today have much more information at their fingertips than the consumers of 1985.

This Means Three Things:

1. Your potential customers have free and instant access to information previously unavailable to them.

2. Consumers do not have to call a company they are interested in right from the start. They can (and do) use the Internet to research the company first.

3. To succeed with postcard marketing, you need to accept these realities and take a modern approach.

But Not to Worry...
Don't be discouraged by all this. Because though the course of this book, I'm going to show you how to avoid the mistakes so many of your competitors have made (and continue to make). I'm going to teach you postcard marketing strategies that have the power to motivate the modern consumer. I'm going to introduce you to the "Super Cards."

Many of these strategies will embrace the behaviors of modern consumers. We know they like to conduct further research about a company online, so let's cater to that! Let's connect our postcard to our website in a cohesive way that increases the chance that both mediums will produce results.

Let's modernize our postcard marketing so that we may climb the Pyramid of Postcard Success.

What? I haven't mentioned the Pyramid yet? Well, then let's take a look...


Read the rest by downloading your copy of the postcard book.