Understanding Direct Response Marketing

The marketing world we currently operate in can be both very diverse, and very complex. Marketing generally involves the process of eliciting an emotional response from consumers and clients in the hopes that it will drive them to do business with you.

One approach that we often encourage our clients to take closer look at is Direct Response Marketing. This type of marketing goes beyond traditional ‘brand building’ and uses marketing as a tool to help you generate direct responses and sales. It can be overlooked by some businesses however and we find can also be misunderstood. As such, it’s important to take a closer look.

Direct Response marketing is different from advertising efforts which focus on building your company’s brand identity in the mind of consumers. While this is also very important, it is equally as important not to ignore putting into place marketing that directly ties to creating immediate responses from either a lead, your current client base, or a referral resource. These responses are not just limited to a purchase they can be quite varied, here are just a few examples:

• Making a decision to buy from you
• Clicking through to visit a website
• Calling to set up an appointment
• Opting into an email list
• Visiting a social media page
• Responding to an event invitation or downloading educational info

In other words, the goal here is to get your potential customers or clients to actually give you their time, money, or attention. It’s important to understand and reiterate that that not all your direct response marketing efforts should be focused on generating a sale right then. Instead, you want customers to take another step towards engaging with your business. Once they visit a site or opt into a mailing list, you will then be able to communicate with them in a more compelling way. This approach can help turn marketing efforts into actual conversations, which in turn will gradually develop a longer term client relationship, as opposed to a one and done purchase.

Direct response marketing also helps your business with the following:

• Achieving measurable data that you can use to direct future marketing strategies.
• Can be fully trackable so you can identify what is working and what isn’t.
• The ability to make special, specific offers directly to potential customers.
• The chance to bring future clients to your business, by nurturing respondents, even if they don’t immediately buy from you.

In short, shifting a bit of your focus to direct response marketing could be enough to generate a big boost in your company’s bottom line and see tremendous increases to your marketing results and to your profits as a whole.