Category Archives for Timeless Marketing

Timeless Marketing 7 – 20X Return on Ad Spend

Today I want to tell a story of how a simple inbound marketing strategy resulted in a colossal return on investment. One day, I met with the marketing director of Point Hilton Resorts in Arizona. We decided to run a three-day Memorial Day promotion. To create the ad, we used information about the habits of […]

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Timeless Marketing 6 – The Piano Club

I used to know a guy who owned a piano store. He didn’t sell much—he’d sold around 250 pianos by the time I got there. His business was on the verge of failure, and he wondered why his full-page newspaper ads weren’t showing any results. I worked at the newspaper at the time, so he […]

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Timeless Marketing 5 – Tracking Your Results

Some of the most valuable marketing stories are the ones that tell a very simple story. In this story, an oil change business was running quite a lot of print advertising in a very inefficient way. They really liked to use direct mail and was mailing around 82,000 people each and every month. He wasn’t […]

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Timeless Marketing 4 – Customer Lifetime Value

For today’s episode of Timeless Marketing, I’m going to share with you a cornerstone concept in marketing. Back in 1993, I already had been marketing for ten years. When this concept came to me, it changed a lot about the way I think about marketing. About everything, really. The concept comes from a story about […]

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Timeless Marketing 3 – More Stories From My Dad

For this episode of Timeless Marketing, I’m going to continue the story about my father, who was a car salesman in the 1960s. Back then, my father did two very smart things when he was selling a car to someone. The first thing was that he would make a special key and present it to […]

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Timeless Marketing 2 – Painted Curbs

It might not seem like it, but marketers had access to detailed information such as consumers’ jobs, marital statuses, weight, mortgage statuses, salaries, vehicles, etc. long before the internet. Still, this manner of data doesn’t offer the one timeless insight you need to know as a marketer: Are these people who’d be interested in what […]

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Timeless Marketing 1 – The Personal Touch

Did you know that 70% of customers returning to a car dealership won’t go to the same salesperson? Yet, my Dad – who sold cars for 40 years – sold STRICTLY to repeat customers for the last 15 years he worked. How did he do it? First, I’ll provide three short answers: direct mail, mailing […]

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