Just in case you had any doubts about the effectiveness of digital marketing, a recent story in The National Post may help you think otherwise. The story is about a business who recruited US distributors to sell silicon germanium (SiGe) semiconductors, which were to be fabricated in China.
The whole business was a complete sham. But the fact that they were able to execute so well in securing $13m in advance deposits over a 4 year period, really makes you ask: How could they have possibly been able to succeed?
Did the company gain the trust of an existing customer base through successful previous business dealings? And then decide to dupe them through the bogus Chinese SiGe. That of course is the popular playbook for investment management fraud.
But that is not the case here. There was no previous business relationship which they took advantage of and manipulated. These business partners were not known to them at all. The key to their success was in fact, you guessed it, digital marketing.
Now you may say that this is just spam. But this does not fall into your typical consumer spam categories. You know the ones: guaranteed weight loss programs; knock-off Rolexes; knock-off Viagra; schemes to increase the size of certain body parts; Russian brides. No, this is high tech. This is a hard sell. Anyone buying technology products is very discerning about the product or service that they are buying. These are the guys who won’t be duped. Yet they were.
Ok. So here is how it breaks down. These are the actual steps that they followed:
1. They hired a web-design specialist.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to look at their website. The whole thing was shut down in 2013 and the culprit accepted his plea bargain and is going to jail. But, this must have been quite a persuasive web site. Full of great marketing content and images. And to some extent, the whole value proposition for the SiGe wafers must have been established.
2. They purchased mail lists.
Now these were not random mail lists. They were from Vietnam. So what kind of mail list from Vietnam has names of individuals who may potentially buy-in to an opportunity to import SiGe from China. Well, quite likely, it is a list of individuals who were interested in these types of opportunities; i.e. importing technological components into the US. So this was a targeted list.
3.They created an email marketing campaign.
You know the aggregate statistics on open rates for unsolicited email are really low. Besides staying out of the spam filter, the only way to improve open rates is to have a subject heading that resonates with the recipient. And then there must have actually been content in the body of those emails, that got the recipient to respond to the call-to-action.
4.Follow-up.
They smoothly transitioned from the marketing cycle to the sales cycle. Somehow they were able to provide sufficient proof in order to get real commitments from their prospects: i.e. advance cash deposits.
Now obviously this was a scam. And they indeed provided all the necessary falsehoods in order to move their prospects to a close. But their marketing methodology seems to be have been quite sound. They were able to come in as an unknown company, offer a value proposition to a discerning target customer, execute a targeted digital marketing campaign, and accomplish their objective of signing up distributors, and obtaining sizable up-front deposits. It certainly should make you think: are you getting the most out of your own marketing strategy?