It’s a fact. As a small business owner I have received many different postcard and direct mail promotions from both Google, Google affiliates and Yahoo! to advertise with them. Why are these large online advertising channels using offline direct mail? At first glance this appears to be a strange conflict of interests.

But this is not an article about direct mail. I will elaborate in a moment.

So why does Google, the single largest online advertising channel in the world, use an offline advertising channel like direct mail? The answer is simple really. And it ties back to some very basic marketing fundamentals.

Marketing Campaigns

In an earlier article on Market Research, KNOW BEFORE YOU GO TO SAVE THOUSANDS IN MARKETING $$$, I gave a definition of marketing from About.com “…the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products and/or services. The key word in this marketing definition is “process”; marketing involves researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services.”

Further, Merriam-Webster defines a campaign as, “a connected series of operations designed to bring about a particular result ”.

So when we look at what a marketing campaign is, it becomes clear that it is series of connected, planned steps designed to get a specific marketing message out to the world or, at least, to a specific target audience.

By definition, using only one channel would NOT achieve the desired result. To campaign effectively, one must use a number of channels. Hence Google and Yahoo!, being very large online advertising channels, use direct mail as one of the channels to reach their target audiences. In this case, small business owners and marketers like me… or you.

So let us take a look at marketing campaigns, why you want to build marketing campaigns (rather than just individual promotion channels) and some simple steps to create a unified campaign that beats the sales drum for your business. (more…)