Direct marketing is a straightforward approach to promoting your business, achieved through careful planning and good timing. It involves using methods like direct mailers, mail orders, telemarketing, mailing lists and direct response advertising to market your products or services to a specific audience.
When implemented correctly, these methods grow your business by building a brand image, generating extra revenue, attracting new leads and retaining existing clients. While several other advertising methods can offer similar benefits, direct marketing still remains one of the most popular and effective strategies among experienced marketers.
Generate Easy Sales
Marketing methods like telemarketing and mailing lists are aimed at delivering a sales pitch to people who are already planning a purchase. This makes them much more likely to buy something. The method involves a lot of research beforehand, but when used effectively, it can’t be rivaled by using any of the traditional advertising mediums.
Build a List of Targeted Leads
The success of your business relies on your ability to produce a list of targeted leads that will be interested in your products or services. As you capture more potential buyers through your direct marketing campaigns, your business network will grow as well. Eventually, you will be able to use that list to push your new products on the market.
Reduce the Advertising Budget of Your Business
If your budget is limited, direct marketing is the best way of promoting your business without having to settle for decreased exposure. You will have to spend more time on research and planning, but the growth of your business won’t be slowed down by a lack of available resources.
Maintain Customer Loyalty
Depending on the kind of business you’re running, your customers may be able to choose a different company over your products and services at any time. Part of your job for retaining these customers is maintaining an unbroken link of two-way communication with them. Direct marketing can set the foundation for that, as long as you’re moderate with your promotion.
Monitor Your Performance
Direct marketing presents all the tools for monitoring the performance of your campaigns and making the necessary adjustments when you launch them again. It’s also a great method of testing new markets with a smaller sample size before making a big launch. This is especially important for new businesses that have just started to grow and require all the information that they can get their hands on.
Stay Ahead of Your Competition
It can often be effective to monitor what your competition is doing online and match or exceed their efforts. If they rely mostly on incoming calls, you can make cold calls in addition to incoming calls. If they rely on social media for a good chunk of new inquiries, you can do that same- just remember that in many industries low tech methods like cold calling and direct mail campaigns can generate a return greater that any of these new internet based methods. Your competition is likely dropping the ball on these time proven ideas.
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