Changing the Channel

Michael Masterson is an entrepreneur who has developed a number of successful companies over a forty-five year business career. Two of these companies have grown beyond $100 million in revenues, two more exceeded $50 million and more than a dozen surpassed the $10 million mark. He is currently a consultant to Agora Inc, a $300 million information publisher which owns EarlytoRise.com, a daily e-zine. Mr. Masterson has written ten other books including Ready, Fire, Aim; Seven Years to Seven Figures; Automatic Wealth; Automatic Wealth For Grads and Anyone Else Just Starting Out and Confessions of a Multi-Millionaire.

Maryellen Tribby is CEO and Publisher of Early to Rise. She is also the founder and Executive Publisher of Investor's Edge Daily and Total Health Breakthroughs. She has more than twenty years experience in publishing and business, including serving as President of Weiss Research and managing divisions of Forbes, Globe Communications, Times Mirror Magazines and Crain's New York Business.

In "the good old days", if you were good enough at one type of marketing, you could do fine. The arrival of the Internet has changed that dynamic. Today, it's necessary that you use multiple channels to attract prospective customers. If you're still just using your one or two traditional channels, you're probably leaving money on the table.

There are twelve marketing channels which are important today:

1. Direct-response online marketing
2. Social media
3. Search engine marketing
4. Teleconferences
5. Direct mail
6. Direct print
7. Direct-response television
8. Direct-response radio
9. Telemarketing
10. Joint ventures
11. Event marketing
12. Public relations

The question today is not really whether to be a multi-channel marketer. That's something of a no-brainer. The real key to success is figuring out which channels to select and then finding ways to integrate those channels together so you multiply both sales and profits. This is the essence of twenty-first century marketing.

The only three ways available to grow your business are:

1. Increase your number of customers.
2. Increase the purchases each customer makes.
3. Increase the average amount of each purchase.

By using a multi-channel marketing approach which harnesses the information era tools now available, you can achieve all three of these objectives in a dramatic way.

1. The key principles you need to know first. To be successful today, you need to be skillful in applying direct marketing principles to all of your advertising and marketing programs. To do that in practice, there are three principles you need to understand well — direct-response marketing (DRM), multi-channel marketing (MCM) and lifetime value (LTV) of your customers.

2. The twelve marketing channels of twenty-first century businesses. Learn how to use twelve marketing channels that are important today.

3. How to put together a powerful multi-channel campaign. Once you have a reasonable understanding of all the channels which are available, you can start putting together a multi-channel campaign which fits your product or service like a glove. This isn't as hard as it might seem at first glance but it involves ten steps: