The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

Chapter 3. Reaching Your Buyers Directly

The frustration of relying exclusively on the media and expensive advertising to deliver your organization’s messages is long gone. Yes, mainstream media is still important, but today smart marketers craft compelling messages and tell the world directly via the Web. The tremendous expense of relying on advertising to convince buyers to pay attention to your product is yesterday’s headache.

Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg are experts in understanding visitors in order to convert Web site traffic into leads, customers, and sales. They offer these services through their company, FutureNow,^[1] and its Persuasion Architecture methodology. The brothers are also authors of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing,^[2] released in the summer of 2006. In a fascinating tale of online marketing, direct-to-consumer news releases, cats versus dogs, and blogging, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? rocketed up the bestseller ranks to number one on the Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller list. How in the world did they do it?

“We developed a scenario, a persuasion architecture scenario, that gets people to buy the book,” says Jeffrey Eisenberg. The campaign started well before the book was released by targeting existing customers and friends through posts on the FutureNow blog^[3] and articles in the company’s GrokDotCom^[4] e-mail newsletter. Separately, the authors sent advance-reading copies of the book to hundreds of influential ...