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Guerilla Marketing In The Internet
Age
Source: INTERNET WIRE
Publication date: 2002-08-13
EXAMPLE: A hypothetical chocolate manufacturer produces
chocolate chips and promotes them on a website under
the company name Mighty Sweet Inc.
Using Pin Point Direct Marketing methods, New Identities
may find that the community of users of those chocolate
chips is not looking up "mighty sweet" as
a search term.
One component of "Pinpoint Direct Marketing™"
is to create a series of web sites to appeal to each
user community (which can then drive traffic to www.mighty-sweet-inc.com
through content, testimonials, endorsements and links).
In this example:
Recent queries to databases have startling revelations.
Did you know that currently, more than 35,000 people
per day are searching for "baby names", as
opposed to 12 months ago only 2000 people per day were
searching for the same term?
What is more startling is that there are only 57 web
sites listed in Yahoo that come up for the term "baby
names".
What is more interesting is that there are approximately
2000 people per day searching for "baby boy names"
and another 2000 searching for "baby boy names"
and there are NO sites indexed by Yahoo for either of
these terms [Yahoo accounts for approximately 40% of
all Internet search engine traffic-when Google logo
appears on Yahoo search results page; it indicates that
no sites for search term are indexed in Yahoo]. The
implications of all this are astounding.
Just think of the Marketing, branding and manufacturing
data suddenly available for clothing manufacturers.
Until recently expensive focus groups and consulting
companies over a three to six month period were necessary
to achieve what can be accomplished in a few hours with
today's technologies.
What they are doing, is taking the public's temperature.
If you know what to target and how to target you can
invest a fraction of your previous marketing dollars
and experience one of those rare Guerilla Marketing
opportunities.
Throw in user group postings, online press releases,
email recipe club, recipe screen savers and a direct
mail campaign to targeted visitors and you've hit a
home run; viral marketing at it's best-marketing direct
to your customers.
"Pinpoint Direct Marketing™" aims to encourage
potential customers to use the Internet in the way it's
most effective: as a dynamic and vast information resource.
By working with search engines, community building,
and viral marketing, New Identities' "Pinpoint
Direct Marketing™" delivers Web surfers the client's
pitch after they have done some research and are ready
to make a purchase.
Big Results for Drug Maker
One of Bock's partners, Jeff Greenfield, explains how
this approach made a huge difference in pharmaceutical
giant Forest Laboratories' marketing of Celexa, a prescription
anti-depressant whose sales had plateaued at $800 million.
"It's like Forest had been assuming that people
would see their ads and say to themselves 'I'm depressed,
I should be using this drug' and then go online to www.celexa.com.
But that's not normally how the Internet works."
Greenfield states, "The real power of the Internet
is in people actually looking for information. You can
look at the numbers and see that a lot more people are
going online to learn about depression than any specific
treatments."
New Identities developed a strategy for Forest that
targeted people who were already searching for more
information about depression, rather than the excessively
broad (and expensive) TV-viewing and Web-surfing audiences
they had courted previously. Bock started with a rigorous
evaluation the depression community including a focus
group-arranged through a third party-which demonstrated
that 45% of new depression medication patients research
online prior to getting a prescription.
Focusing on that group of Web researchers, determined
the terms searched most often and drove traffic to the
website through such terms as teen depression, clinical
depression, medical side effects, etc. The strategy
included creating sites, like www.healingdepression.com,
to encourage readers to learn more about depression,
with links to the product site where appropriate. The
Celexa site was constructed to dynamically generate
content tailored to the referring site.
"In the end," says Greenfield, "this
approach ends up getting people to www.celexa.com
only when they are ready for that. Sure, you could have
a pop-up ad connecting to the site for people that search
for information about depression, but it wouldn't be
as effective. That person isn't interested in learning
about products yet-they want to research the condition
first. Our approach encourages them to do that."
To add value to the Celexa site, New Identities developed
tools for patients. A prescription reminder reminds
individuals when they should take their medicine. The
"Action Tracker" encourages people to track
activities that increase the likelihood of successful
treatment success, like exercising regularly and eating
well-balanced meals.
The results for Forest were dramatic!
The average number of monthly visitors climbed from
around 21,000 to over 600,000, drug sales increased
20% over the following 12 months, even while Forest
Laboratories' average monthly investment into promotion
dipped to just 10% of what it had been previously. "At
the same time," says Greenfield, "Celexa became
the hot new drug. The online marketing had a lot to
do with that."
In a letter to Bock, Forest Laboratories Senior Product
Manager Matthew Warburton says the work "enabled
Forest to surge ahead in its utilization of the Internet
for e-business solutions and make dramatic strides in
its direct to consumer online marketing program."
At Risk Online Every Day: Brands
As more and more people use the Internet in the purchase
process, an unsophisticated approach to the Web could
start costing businesses a lot more than missed opportunities.
A cruise line once approached New Identities eager to
improve their online presence. Even though the company
was regularly flooded with letters, cards, and e-mails
from very satisfied customers, New Identities found
that for some reason when the company came up on popular
online message boards about travel, most of the postings
were negative. New Identities' research also found that
online cruise shoppers often visited these message boards
before making a purchase decision.
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