Yikes… The truth behind our Everywhere Small Business product

Let me start off with the truth:

We used to hate digital marketing.

As a direct mail company, when digital marketing hit the mainstream, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t take a hit.

Because we did.

You know the story…

Google stole our search engine hearts by 2000. Once a weird googly word, now we’re all saying, “just google it.”

The smartphone became everyone’s new addiction by 2007, and we saw a ton of newspapers and magazines, once cultural staples, disappear practically overnight.  

And you can already guess what happened to “old-school” mail…

From 2006 to 2017, direct mail volume decreased 29.85%, which means your mailbox has one-third less mail in it than 10 years ago.

The changes were BIG back then, and to stay in business, frankly, we had to change. 

So we did what every small business owner does under pressure…

We buckled down and researched different, yet-to-try marketing tactics with high hopes for our bottom line.

In fact:

We spent $26,346 testing these so-called surefire marketing methods:

• Social media by hiring an outside agency
• A fancy PR agency
• Radio ads
• And TV ads

So what happened?

That $26,346 ended up WASTED on useless ads that brought in $2036 in revenue.

Wasting precious marketing dollars hits us small business owners extremely hard — know the feeling?

So what did we do next?

We scrapped the fancy agencies and media ads as step one. Yet we knew there had to be some potential in the digital marketing world with the internet being what it is.

Don’t get me wrong…

Direct mail WORKS, but we couldn’t ignore consumers moving online.

More specifically —

We couldn’t ignore Google and the omnipresent Facebook.

After $7,152,682 total in testing over 2 years, we finally came up with a formula that was bringing in terrific results for us with our own marketing: 

• Direct mail postcards mailed to a targeted list
• Matching Google ads to those same prospects
• Matching Facebook ads
• And later, matching Instagram ads too.

It’s interesting how this coordinated digital-direct-mail program worked so well even after our digital-only tests did not bring in a positive ROI. Let me explain…

Thanks to digital’s explosion in the mid-2000s, prospects were being inundated with hundreds of marketing messages per day. Everyone was marketing online – from legit companies like Coca Cola, to scam websites thrown up in a day selling clothing knock-offs.

At the same time, people’s physical mailboxes at their homes were less full. Marketers moved their budgets to digital advertising and fewer people used mail to promote.  

What did this mean for the companies who stuck with traditional direct mail in the new digital world?

Their marketing stuck out even more.

Tacking on matching digital ads to the postcard mailings was the perfect combination. The direct mail postcards gave prospects the tangible legitimacy needed to garner trust and the matching digital ads gave repetition of the marketing message in a cost-effective way.

We had FINALLY found a formula that worked!

But now we had a new problem.

Truth be told…

Discovering this winning marketing formula and putting it into play required the following for it to work:

• 10 full-time people in our marketing department with 56 years of collective marketing experience
• A $4,160,000 annual marketing budget
• And a seasoned Chief Marketing Officer overseeing it all

How could we replicate this highly-staffed formula for small business owners whose marketing budgets were much more limited?

We had to build a team that could deliver this to small business owners and proprietary software that would allow them to do it efficiently.

Here’s what we did:

1. We met directly with executives at Google to discuss the most efficient way to pull this off.
2. We then hired a team of brilliant Google ad specialists who knew how to efficiently manage a large-scale volume of small-budget accounts
3. We brought on Facebook experts who were trained on how to deliver the best results for the lowest dollar amount spent on ads.
4. And we hired 5 full-time software developers to build proprietary software to automate the tracking analytics for clients’ campaigns in a convenient online dashboard. 

Reliving it all is actually kind of exhausting! Ha! But we survived, and after significant testing and tweaking, we launched the product to our 87,926 small business customers.

Small Business owners could now access a completely automatic marketing campaign that targeted qualified prospects with a postcard and matching ads on Google, Facebook and Instagram for as little as 54 cents each.  

We named it Everywhere Small Business so that every small business could market themselves everywhere — but on a budget that wouldn’t bust their bank account.

Clients of ours that use Everywhere Small Business see results like 349% more new patients, with digital ad impressions in excess of 1 million views.

So my point?

If you need help with your marketing but don’t have a big business budget (or a 10-person marketing team), check out Everywhere Small Business in this 1-minute video.

We use this program ourselves at PostcardMania, and we ONLY recommend and offer strategies we’ve tested and proven to ourselves to work. In fact, our current rejection rate for new marketing products is 94.3% (sorry to all of the products we’ve said no too, we know we’re a tough crowd). 

You can also call one of our marketing consultants at 800-628-1804 and they’ll demo the software to you for free with no obligation to purchase. I think you’ll find it really interesting if you are looking for an efficient way to grow your small business.

As always, you can email me directly at joy.gendusa@postcardmania.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Best,

Joy