Google Adwords is the new post office:

When I was growing up, advertising pieces stuck in our Sunday newspaper was the only way to see what was on sale.

Fast forward 30 years, we now whip out our mobile phones and search. Searching is the way we get information now and there’s no way to get back.

From the advertiser’s perspective, this change of behavior is detrimental to their marketing spend. They now have to “compete” for eyeball time. It’s either the “first-page” or death and Google has a chokehold on everyone that tries to get their product and services in front of the right people.

You are already lost:

Today, advertisers no longer compete on the competencies of their product but to compete with their marketing budget. There’s a relevant analogy in today’s political campaigns but I am going to leave that for another day.

When you compete with your competitors on marketing budgets to be the “top results” or “first-page”, you already lost. Someone else will just have to up their bid by a penny and you will have to cough up more money to Google and your CAC (customer acquisition cost) is decimated again.

The only winner is Google.

Targeted direct mail is the only solution:

Direct Mail, a piece of information delivered right to the consumer’s mailbox is the only salvation to lenders and financial services organizations that try to spend their marketing dollars wisely.

You can dump all that money with google, affiliates or social media, but your return on investment is small and your budget will be incinerated within a few days with nothing to show for.

Targeted direct mail leverages data and analytics that you can control to target the right audience without paying a hefty toll to lead generators, affiliate networks, and worse google and Facebook.

Algorithm vs. Algorithm:

I’ve talked to many lenders and they lament to me that whatever advertising piece was working all of the sudden stopped. Worse, whatever bidding strategy they used on the bidding network no longer works and their CAC and default rates are shooting through the roof.

No one knows how Google works and the end-users as well as advertising are always in the dark and some fearful of getting banned altogether because their advertising piece must be approved by “someone”.

The solution is using your own customized algorithm that leverages true credit data and advertises directly to the consumer.

We can develop custom algorithms with the same sophistication as Google to target your customers with thousands of attributes at your disposal.

You don’t have to pay a tollway, advertising platform, competing with someone else that has a bigger budget or fear of compliance issues anymore.

If you want to own your customers and develop a relationship and brand loyalty. You must develop your own algorithm and target directly to your end-users.