Direct and search marketing firm SendTec Inc. has launched a direct response television campaign to promote its agency services.
The campaign, launched June 4, will be run around the clock for several weeks on the major business TV networks.
“We believe it is the first of its kind,” said Paul Soltoff, chairman/CEO of SendTec, St. Petersburg, FL. “We know, for example, on CNN, CNBC and MSNBC they’ve never seen anything like this before. I think after we do this it’s going to open the eyes of major advertisers and search engine marketing companies and I suspect that you’ll see companies come right behind us.”
The campaign objective is to offer a service to businesses that depend on search engine marketing as a major component of their customer-acquisition program.
“It’s a high-end, one-minute direct response TV commercial that talks about our unique capability as a search engine marketing company with a couple of strong offers,” Mr. Soltoff said. “One is to provide an interested advertiser a SWOT analysis as well as to offer him or her a book entitled ’50 Biggest Search Engine Marketing Mistakes,’ which we authored.”
The thought behind the campaign is that the search engine marketing business is now exceeding $9 billion a year, according to Mr. Soltoff.
“You can’t have a digital presence without either managing your own search engine marketing or outsourcing it,” he said. “What’s going on in this space right now is all these dollars pour into the online digital world and much of it’s going to search engine marketing.
“Consequently, lots of advertisers’ clicks are costing more, acquisitions are costing more, their ROI is not improving, and we believe our solution overcomes those barriers and problems for advertisers,” he said. “We think the audience is now big enough on a BTB basis so we can go out with an offline marketing program and drive search engine business development customers. This is a real change in the way this kind of marketing has ever been done before.”
The spot is a two-dimensional animation that takes viewers through and into a search engine environment, presenting them with obstacles that they have to manage through and navigate around as they improve their search marketing. It ends with a call-to-action card, showing a toll-free number, the http://www.12.sendtecnow.com/ Web address and two offers.
“We think there are just thousands – if not tens of thousands – of businesses that are looking for a better search engine solution,” Mr. Soltoff said. “We believe our platform is one, and we think that the BTB audience is large enough to be able to use a broad marketing medium.”
