Trusted environments and direct marketing
Posted 24th January 2010 at 04:46 PM by psresearch
You may not like a lot of the way affiliate marketing was conducted in 2009 but there's an awful lot that can be learned from the phenomenon that can be applied to ethical direct marketing.
For example, fake news sites like News3Insider.com have apparently worked incredibly well. But why?
There's not much new to report on there except what is likely obvious to experienced direct marketers:
1) Using advertorials instead of straight sales pitches (although many times the advertorial nature is not disclosed).
2) Appeal to authority - i.e. Google - (taken to the extreme many of the fake news sites go beyond "appealing" and instead imply (or lie) that the statements are coming FROM authoritative sources.
3) Leveraging recognized elements (here they are leveraging Google - but one test that many direct marketers have often shown to increase sales is merely putting recognizable credit card logos in the order process.
Of course there has also been the whole FaceBook phenomenon which scammers quickly learned was a quick way to gain trust just by running ads IN what FaceBook users consider a "trusted environment".
Think about this the next time you are selecting sites to run your advertisements on and go beyond just thinking about the demographics of the site, but also about the trust-ranking of that site as well among it's members.
For example, fake news sites like News3Insider.com have apparently worked incredibly well. But why?
There's not much new to report on there except what is likely obvious to experienced direct marketers:
1) Using advertorials instead of straight sales pitches (although many times the advertorial nature is not disclosed).
2) Appeal to authority - i.e. Google - (taken to the extreme many of the fake news sites go beyond "appealing" and instead imply (or lie) that the statements are coming FROM authoritative sources.
3) Leveraging recognized elements (here they are leveraging Google - but one test that many direct marketers have often shown to increase sales is merely putting recognizable credit card logos in the order process.
Of course there has also been the whole FaceBook phenomenon which scammers quickly learned was a quick way to gain trust just by running ads IN what FaceBook users consider a "trusted environment".
Think about this the next time you are selecting sites to run your advertisements on and go beyond just thinking about the demographics of the site, but also about the trust-ranking of that site as well among it's members.
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