Last time I talked about effective marketing secret #2, which is the idea that branding is NOT marketing. Again, it’s incredibly important to develop your ‘brand’, but as a small business, investing money simply to develop name recognition is quite possibly the BIGGEST mistake you could make.
So that being said, what should you do as a business owner to generate leads, convert customers, and ultimately grow your business to where you want it to be?
The answer lies in effective marketing secret #3, understanding that direct response marketing is, hands down, THE BEST way to market your business.
Now, not everyone’s clear on what the term ‘direct response marketing’ means so I’ll share with you my definition. Direct response marketing is a type of marketing that is very targeted in that you’re only reaching out to a highly targeted group of prospects. Also, everything you do with direct response marketing had a very specific action you’d like your prospects or customers to take.
An example of direct response marketing would be when you send out a postcard to a highly targeted group of prospects offering a free consumer guide and to get this guide they would need to visit a website and complete a form.
This is very effective and incredibly powerful way to market your business for a couple of reasons:
First, because you can tell right away if something is working or not. If you have a good enough percentage of prospects logging onto your website and completing the form, then you know you’ve done a good job.
If they don’t hit your website, then you know your postcard wasn’t strong enough. If they hit your website, but don’t opt-in as expected, then you know your offer wasn’t strong enough. Of course that’s simplifying it just a tad, but hopefully you get the picture.
Second, with direct response marketing you’re only spending money on things you know will reach prospects you’ve identified as being interested and qualified to buy the products or services you offer.
I guess some would argue that branding reaches your target audience directly as well, and that may be true, but the important difference lies in what’s being said. Again, branding is simply focused on developing name recognition while direct response marketing is focused on immediate results and sales.
The third benefit of direct response marketing is that it’s scalable. If you send out this postcard and it works, wouldn’t you want to send more of them out? And on the flip side, if it’s a complete flop don’t you think you’d want to bag the campaign all together? Or at the very least go back and try to improve it.
In any case, direct response marketing gives you the ability to control very tightly the amount you spend on your marketing campaigns. So if you only have $150 to do some marketing with, you could spend $150. Once you generate some sales with the $150, you would hopefully then turn around and invest some of your returns in more marketing, and so on and so forth.
So as you look for was to grow your business in this difficult environment, take a good hard look at incorporating direct response marketing into your marketing plans because there’s no other form of marketing that will give you the bang for your proverbial buck.
