Old School Direct Response

I was reading a post on a forum the other day where a fellow marketer referred to a well-known marketer Ken Mcarthy as an "old school direct response" marketer.  That caught me in my tracks for a minute.  It was almost as thought his person had implied that Ken was somehow out of date, maybe not quite up to speed on some of the latest trends and fads in the online marketing world.

In fact, as I have mentioned before, the fundamentals of marketing are the same today as they were a hundred years ago.  And in fact, there is valuable information in books that were written 100 years ago that could still turn any internet business around.

See, what some people fail to understand is that marketing online today is just different tools to do the same job.  You still need a good headline, you still need a good call to action, a follow up system, upsell, etc, etc.  The guys that were doing this through small ads and postal mail 100 years ago had the same issues and hurdles to overcome as we do.  We just have different tools, a different medium.  Same marketing.

In fact, it should be easier for us today.  100 years ago, they had to run an ad in a magazine or newspaper and then wait for the people to get that, and mail in their orders.  It could take a couple of weeks before you even knew if your firs ad was responsive or if you had to tweak it.  Now we can do that with Google Adwords in a matter of minutes to get results.  Maybe it has gotten too easy for us and we have become lazy.  We are so used to getting immediate results that we don’t even bother to try harder.

Don’t discount the ideals of the old school direct marketers, these people know where it is at.  Sure , they may not be up to date with Twitter or the latest trend in online video but I am going to suggest that a direct response marketer from 100 years ago could do better online today than most internet marketers.

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