Moving Through the Funnel with Direct Marketing
Direct marketing is an extremely effective form of promotion that involves targeting your customer without the use of an advertising middleman. Direct marketing is designed to generate a response by any means that is measurable. You’re presenting information about your company and its products or services to a potential interested consumer that has already been determined to be a likely buyer. Your advertising is to make a specific offer to a specific audience that clearly outlines the benefits, is personalized, and has a clear call to action.
Some examples of direct response marketing include; brochures, catalogs, newsletters, postcards, coupons, emails, phone calls, and target online display ads.
The main goal of direct marketing is to convert your customer into a buyer. Your advertisements are designed specifically to persuade your customer to take action. Keep in mind that your customer may not buy right away. The customer buying journey may take some time. You need to build a relationship with your customers. You don’t ask someone to be your girlfriend or boyfriend on the first date, you often have to go on a few dates first to get to know each other before you commit to being in a relationship with them. The same thing goes with your business and when you’re selling to your customers. They want to get to know your brand and your brands' story first before they invest their money. It takes time to convince your customer why they should spend their hard-earned money on your products or services.
The customer buying journey can be complex and different depending on the type of person. Although, there is a common buyer’s journey and funnel that we can follow with our advertisements.
The funnel is called AIDA – Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
Awareness is when the consumer becomes aware of your brand and the products or services you offer. Some tools used to gain awareness include content marketing, paid ads, SEO, PR, and social media posts.
Interest is when the consumer becomes interested in learning about your brand and the benefits of your products and services. This is when the consumer is trying to determine whether your product fits within their lifestyle. Some tools used to gain the consumers' interest include landing pages, e-books, case studies, newsletters, free tools, and retargeting.
Desire is when the consumer begins to favour your brand and becomes highly interested in purchasing your product or service over other competitors. Some tools used to move the consumer from being interested in wanting to purchase your product include sales pages, trust signs, promotions, free trials, free consultations, demos, and email marketing.
Action is when the consumer has the intention to purchase your product, shops around, and in the end purchases your product. To be ready for a consumer to take action you need to have a proper payment system, shopping cart, and social proof including reviews and referrals.
Based on the information that you’re able to gather about your customer you can then present information to the people who have already expressed interest in your product or service. This is the perfect opportunity to make your messages personal and perceived to be designed just for them. You want to make your customer feel special and show that you care about them. The ultimate goal is to convert the consumer into one that desires your product.
In general, by targeting already interested customers through direct marketing you’re saving money and getting a high ROI. Unlike awareness advertising where you have to spend a ton of money to get them knowing and interested in your brand. The ROI is stronger because you’re specifically targeting customers that have already expressed an interest in your brand rather than not knowing about you at all.
A key benefit to direct marketing is the fact that is it measurable. There are several ways to track the success of your direct marketing campaigns allowing you to improve over time. To better understand how to target your customer you can use your database analytics. Look at your customer activity and the number of times they checked out your business in the past. If your customer has bought in the past, also look into the total transaction averages and spending power. Learning this you can gain ideas on how you can re-target and get repeat purchases.
My personal favourite type of direct marketing is response video marketing. Something that can get the attention of a customer and get them to act on the spot by offering a limited-time offer or free incentive. This especially works for businesses that are trying to get people to sign up for their webinar, course, free training, or masterclass. For products, a great example of response video TV marketing is through the use of infomercials that demonstrate the product and the benefits multiple times in a row with a clear and concise call to action.
Terry O’ Reilly discusses Facebook's use of data scraping in his podcast Under The Influence (S1E17 – Hypertargeting). He mentions how Facebook sells users' data to advertisers and in 2019 they generated $3 Billion dollars in revenue doing so. Facebook recently started experimenting with monitoring conversations. His wife wrote about weddings to her friends once and not long after she was getting targeted with wedding ads. Facebook now can monitor spoken conversations in real-time. 20%-30% of divorce petitions even cite Facebook as a factor!
Lately, bigger companies have been cracking down on the amount of personal information that is available for businesses. People can opt-out of sharing their cookies. This hinders the ability of advertisers to get the information necessary to know consumers of interest. It’s becoming increasingly harder to target interested customers with conversion ads especially because of these updates. Businesses are leaning more towards alternatives to direct marketing through paid ads with things such as direct mail. Some direct mail can be corporative and include advertisements such as coupons.
Overall, it is becoming increasingly difficult to engage in direct response marketing through paid advertisements. There are still many alternatives to look into and it is important to know your consumer buying process so you can better understand how and when to target them. Make sure to clearly outline the benefits, personalize your offer, and have a clear call to action. Make sure to measure your ROI and pivot where necessary!
If you have any questions about direct response media, let me know in the comments below! I would be happy to answer.
Terry O'Reilly. (2021, June 18). Under the Influence. Terry O'Reilly. Retrieved Nov 11, 2021, from https://terryoreilly.ca/under-the-influence/.
