Direct marketing is a type of advertising that relies on communicating with potential customers individually rather than using other, less personal forms of communication, such as a recorded ad or an image. This type of marketing is an excellent method of developing a personal relationship with a customer, which can help companies understand and sway how customers feel about their brand.
But what is direct marketing exactly, and how can companies use it to improve their bottom line? Let’s go over the 4 phases of direct marketing and the benefits that each phase provides.
1. Identify your target audience
As with any marketing campaign, you want to have a strong idea of who the ideal customer is for your brand. You can build your target audience in a variety of ways, including reaching out to existing customers, defining interested age groups or demographics using your social media presence, or advertising in niche communities online that are relevant to your product.
A target audience helps to ensure that your marketing strategy is focused and effective, which will help you boost sales and increase brand loyalty in the long-term. It also helps you to identify your core customers and create content that will connect with them specifically.
Note! It might be tempting to create ads that appeal to everyone, but that ultimately means that you aren’t speaking to anyone in particular.
2. Choose effective marketing channels
Next, you should choose the marketing channels that will work best for your direct campaign. The most well-known marketing channels for direct marketing are social media, telemarketing, and email.
To ensure you’re reaching your target audience effectively, consider the channels that your target audience utilizes most. For example, Facebook’s daily users tend to be older, while Instagram and TikTok skew towards younger audiences. LinkedIn is dominated by networking professionals and job seekers while YouTube is known for connecting fans with creators. There are a million ways you could distinguish between social media communities, so be sure to do your research.
As for telemarketing, companies are advised to be careful. Customers are receiving more robocalls and spam calls than ever before, and the majority of customers won’t pick up for numbers they don’t recognize. Consider setting up a time to speak with your customers over the phone instead of cold-calling them – they’re more likely to pick up and they’ll appreciate it.
Email, meanwhile, is a valuable direct marketing technique that’s still in broad use today.
3. Produce the campaign
Once you’ve researched the marketing channels that might suit your target audience best, you can then use that data to create an optimized communication strategy for that particular channel. Focus on the strengths of the marketing channels you’re utilizing and determine how users typically interact with the platform. For example, YouTube and TikTok emphasize video content from known content creators, so consider partnering with an established influencer to create an ad that speaks directly to the influencer’s audience.
Wherever your ad may be located, your direct marketing campaign should have a strong call to action. “Shop now,” “Click here to learn more,” “Call for a free consultation,” etc. are all effective methods of straightforwardly driving traffic to your store page or landing page.
Critically, consider the ways you can personalize your communication with the user. Include their name when possible, offer special deals that aren’t being advertised publicly, and speak directly to that user’s demographic. All of these strategies can help the user feel like they’re the exclusive target of the communication.
4. Review and reinvest
Finally, you should measure the success of your direct marketing campaign and reinvest or rework if you don’t see the results you want. Social media and emailing platforms provide analytics relating to how many people interacted with your communication – this can give you insight into how successful your campaign was. You can track information like how many users looked at your email or post and how many users visited your website as a result.
Direct marketing, like all forms of cold nurture marketing, requires consistency and a long-term plan. Speak with a strategist at F22 today, and develop a digital marketing plan with the experts.
