According to the Daily Herald today, lots of folks. And not just old people either!
Last week I got called concerning the marketing practices of Spack, Inc. Big tipoff should have been my answer to their question “Is your marketing budget more or less than $15,000?” “Less.” Somehow, I still managed to get the invite to come and hear their presentation, and today was the day.
For a few select local businesses, like Spack, Inc., the Daily Herald is offering a limited time deal, whereby you can get a couple ads a week for $149. I was kind of thinking the number would be like $50 a month. Turns out that it is a heck of a deal, since normally a single ad is like $400. Who knew?
- it is possible to actually advertise in a newspaper
- the rates are apparently outside the current $0 guerrilla marketing budget of Spack, Inc
I am of course, a bit torn over marketing generally. If those marketers are so smart, why aren’t they programmers? I guess people are all smart in different ways, but there you go. Kind of one of those things that I figure will just take care of itself, but it sure isn’t for dear holaservers.com.
The details might be a little foggy, but in a former life we did something like an eight-way split concerning our new blogging software. To find the data for the eight ways was a little rough. I think some required parsing logs, some required writing scripts, I think all required writing queries, and pretty well all required work. Testing the eight ways was pretty well as bad as generating them. In the end I believe we made $0 off the send. Tens of hours of work for several folks including me, one of my high priced engineers, the director of product management, I think a design guy, a content guy and a tester. For yeah, $0. It may be that in the end we grossed $100 off the send, but I don’t think that even paid for me.
So, my point? Don’t do anything? Well, no, that’s really my point. Tell the future? Yeah, that might kind of be my point. At least tell the future on the effort and then make decisions accordingly.
It seems like we had at least a mailing or two that had like a million sends and no conversions. Keep it up! We also had billing reminder notices, that were a fair amount of work to get going that led to folks cancelling their accounts. I think that is part of just honest business practices though, so I am ok with that.
I imagine more tales of marketing woes will follow as I have a marketing spend 🙂
Almost forgot my favorite question of the day, something like, “I should know this, but what does Spack, Inc. do?”
And why the heck does marketing only have one t?
Enjoy!
Earl