You might wonder why I’m going to write about direct marketing? It does headbutt from time to time with brand marketing, but they don’t have to. In a nutshell, it consists of using any marketing tool or platform to communicate with your customers directly. This can be through mail, social media, texting etc.
For example, you are a photographer located in Oxford, and you know around July there will be new graduates. A form of direct marketing would be to target all Oxford University followers within a certain age and offer them headshot photos at a discounted price. This form of marketing can be measured closely. You can check how many people have viewed your offer, what time they’ve considered it, how many people liked it, how many clicked on it and how many made a purchase after their click.
Forms of direct marketing:
There are many forms of direct marketing I’ve listed a few, but this is not a complete list as some techniques become less efficient and new methods are introduced all the time.
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- flyers
- coupons
- phone calls
- text messages
Goals of direct marketing:
The primary purpose of direct marketing is to generate immediate sales. It is mostly focused on a short-term goal whatever that may be. Maybe it is an end of season clearance, and you need to get rid of the old inventory, or maybe you want to attract new customers by offering a discount for every new customer if they subscribe to your newsletter. So what are other potential goals of direct marketing?
- Collect emails
- Perform an action; Install an app, fill out a survey.
- Make a purchase
- Requesting a quote
Why is direct marketing popular?
Direct marketing is like a drug, and many marketers and CEOs can easily get hooked on it. It is popular because you can directly target your users. Nothing makes an owner happier than to calculate how much they are spending on getting revenue. The offer is only presented to people interested in the subject based on their preferences. A t-shirt company might target people in London with different products than when they want to target people in Italy. You can see why it is popular to narrow or broaden your target group as you wish.
Some other reasons why it’s popular:
- You can measure the campaign.
- Cost-effective for potential buyers.
- Personalisation; name, language etc. depending on the available datapoints
- Higher return on investment since it is targeted
- You can see the results fairly fast.
Downsides of direct marketing
The dangers of this form of marketing lies in overusing it. It will bring down your branding if you send out a new offer every day to all your customers, not to mention the irritation and reputational damage caused by spamming their inboxes full. You don’t want to make your brand all about the price unless that is the goal of your company!. Use of this method is done delicately to preserve the brand’s good name but at the same time offer valuable offers to your customer base.
Challenges to watch with direct marketing are:
- Overusing
- Reputation
- costs
I hope you have a better understanding of what direct marketing is, next time I will do the same on brand marketing and why we need them both!