Or online marketing marketed offline

The good old fashioned postman dropped some good old fashioned snail mail through my letterbox. I’m working from home today so excitedly picked the mail up off the floor and flicked through it.

One was addressed to “The lovely person who lives at…”. I gave it to son 2 to open as he was disappointed that there were no letters for him personally. “It’s a £130k cheque” he exclaimed excitedly (no strikethrough).  Nah. Only joking.

The letter was an invitation to “join the online community for Lincoln”. I sighed and put it in a pile of other junk ready for recycling.

Then it occurred to me that hey, here was a website trying to drum up business using traditional direct marketing methods. The website was called streetlife.com.

Now I don’t know which B@$!&rd business has sold them my address. Maybe no one as the letter wasn’t addressed to me personally. Shouldn’t be allowed to spam me anyway.

Then I thought “what an expensive way to recruit new website users” and “how inefficient”.

Just goes to show how much money it really takes to get your stuff seen these days. The holy grail is free viral online marketing but that very rarely happens. When you are actively promoting something you get visitors to your website. When you stop this the visitors stop, or at least there are fewer of them. This is why you see lots of online affiliate marketing websites advertise on TV. It’s big bucks. The more visitors you want the more you have to actively promote the site.

This costs money in the case of streetlife.com it’s money spent on direct mail. It’s also probably money spent with a marketing agency. The letter tells me their site has been featured in the Guardian, Sunday Times, Woman & Home and BBC News. It is probable that this exposure was down to time spent pitching to journalists (one assumes). Money.

Woman & Home tells me who their audience really is, as perhaps does their mode of address. Personally I already have as many social media platforms as I can handle, probably too many as G+ isn’t doing anything. Without looking at it seems to me that Facebook already serves the same purpose as streetlife.

I won’t be signing up with streetlife. Call me a miserable git.

On the upside streetlife have now got themselves some major free exposure on trefor.net 😉 As I finish a tune enters my head: Streetlife, there ain’t no place I can’t go…