Simply writing “direct marketing” makes my body shudder.
I remember being fresh out of college and without any job prospects.
One of the only places that would give me an interview was a direct sales company who sold a product called the Kirby.
The Kirby was this vacuum cleaner that was suppose to work better than any other vacuum cleaner in the world.
I don’t think they used the slogan, “We suck better,” but my direct sales skills did suck.
In those days, direct sales consisted of punishing yourself and subjecting yourself to tons of rejection and only those with the most ironclad will and constitution survived.
We are lucky to live in the digital age, where internet direct marketing replaces the pain of direct marketing/sales with the surety of great data and push button execution.
[leadplayer_vid id=”528E8A50E3B16″]
According to this link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_marketing – direct marketing is a channel-agnostic type of advertising where the goal is to place your product directly in the face of customers with the goal of having them make a purchase and/or collecting information to marketing to them at a later date. In the age of technology, we have plenty of tools to do direct marketing at an expert level.
Collecting Data for Your Marketing Campaign
We also have tools that let us quickly collect data to determine the value of our internet direct marketing campaign. One of the best and most data driven forms of direct marketing is PPC marketing. The most popular and lucrative PPC arena is the Google Adwords program, where ads are displayed in search results.
PPC marketing is so beloved by businesses and individuals because you receive immediate data that lets you know how your campaign works. It is not unheard of for a company to know how a campaign will work after a few hundred clicks or so.
Other forms of internet direct marketing are email marketing, classified ad marketing, SEO, SEM, Banner advertisement and social media. All of these platforms make it easy to run a direct marketing campaign. As an aside, these same platforms can be used in an indirect way to build brand value. This is not so different as to how television commercials are used for direct marketing and indirect marketing.
The TV commercial that tells you to call now to buy something is using direct marketing. The latest McDonald’s commercial with a silly song is using indirect marketing to keep their brand in the public. When the hot redhead in the Wendy’s commercial is making fun of everyone who doesn’t have a Wendy’s sandwich or salad, she is doing indirect marketing. Eat Wendy’s or you are a loser!
The Tenants of Internet Direct Marketing
These are very loose guidelines that all internet direct marketing campaigns should have:
(1) State the problem
(2) Describe how your product/service can solve the problem
(3) Use a call of action to enter your viewer into your sales funnel
Artfully done, these three things will lead to success. You must also be willing to create multiple campaigns to test out on the market. PPC managers call this split testing or A/B testing. This is done to see which campaign or message connects with people the most.
This also saves you money in the long run and allows you to only put the bulk of your time and money behind campaigns that have been show to work. This is why direct marketing is so data driven and why you must test test test. The data that we are able to collect via the internet makes direct marketing fun, fast and it creates a fortune for those who put in the time to get better at it.
If you want to learn even more about direct marketing on the internet, then you should research the various forms of marketing and how you can deliver your message as fast and as cheaply as you can to a large number of people. As it has been shown, it is a great time to be a direct marketer because we have so many tools and platforms to apply our craft and we are able to use data/math to streamline our marketing, guaranteeing our success. Get off the fence and jump into the game.
