How did high value products and services sell anthing before Google PPC?Here’s how…

The world is obsessed with “digital activations”: From social media schedules to Google PPC to intrusive AI suggestions in Microsoft Word: ‘Would you like to write a bedtime story about dinosaurs for an 8 year old?’ – Well no actually, I can’t think of anything more irrelevant.

Think of the current obsession with ‘digital’ as a party in full swing. Everyone is drunk and high on coke and everyone is screaming at you all at the same time. You cannot make out a single word anyone is saying because everyone is talking at once. This is not unlike the blizzard of information that our smart phones bring to this particular party.

We see thousands of advertising messages every day on our phones alone. How the hell can any of that land? How can it register? Your guess is as good as mine. I use a lead generation platform, where around 85% of enquiries are about Google PPC and SEO. So it seems people are of the opinion that “digital” is the be all and end all for advertisers.

So who wins from all this digital activity? Well Google certainly do. The total Google Advertising Revenue for 2024 was approximately $264 billion. Using it’s own proprietary Gemini AI engine to research pain points for a new sector I’m unfamiliar with, will always yield a high likelihood that Google will recommend its advertising products. 

‘Thumb-stopping’ is the holy grail: When you stop the scroll and focus the intended customers thoughts on the product or service in hand.

But if you’re trying to reach people where each transaction is worth hundreds, or indeed thousands of pounds? In these situations, we are looking backwards, not forwards…

Increasingly – and especially with a 45+ age range, personalised direct mail is proving just as effective as it always was. Profile your customers, and drop a creatively crafted message onto their doormat.

Print technology has come a long way, although all printers are finding it tough, such is the shift away from print to digital. You can now give a printer a spreadsheet and an artwork file and say “on each copy – change the last word in the headline to the first name of the recipient. It works equally well in B2B and B2C scenarios.

So if you’re spending high 5 figure sums on Google PPC and not getting the results you had hoped for – maybe it’s time to try something different. I grew up in the business before Macs, before the Internet and before the obsession with ‘digital’. You might be surprised to learn that we all got on just fine and sold lots of things, without TikTok, Instagram, or Google PPC Advertising.

One last thing: There are ‘click shops’, often located in the Philippines who exist solely to click on your competitors adverts to generate erroneous ‘clicks’: Their CPA subsequently goes through the roof… You can hire them for peanuts too.

Examples of our success in Direct mail can be found here.