Don’t Reinvent the Marketing Wheel
Direct marketing ideas have been tested and proven to work over a long period of time. They are concepts that have been around since the 1800’s and are still being used today by very savvy and wealthy marketers.
Direct marketing's birth occurred as early as the late 1800's. A man by the name of A. Montgomery Ward made a small investment and rented space on an 8 x 12 printed sheet ─ this was the first Montgomery Ward "catalogue." Sears & Roebuck followed suit with their direct mail catalog. Today there are thousands of specialty mail order houses around the country.
Direct marketing has expanded to include direct mail, mail order, telemarketing, radio, newspaper, television, and the Internet. All are involved in direct marketing.
The key ingredient with direct marketing is the direct response tool. Here direct marketing takes a dramatic turn away from traditional marketing and traditional advertising.
Direct marketing calls for some type of action to be taken by the prospect. (Action…there’s that word again!) The prospect in some way will have to do something ─ request more information or place an order immediately.
Have you noticed all of those infomercials on TV? How about the QVC channel? Or HSN? This is all direct marketing. They are trying to get you to take some kind of action today, this minute, right NOW!
Institutional advertising is just the opposite. The consumer isn't asked to do anything. Of course, the advertiser hopes they will…but they don't ask. Watch the ads on TV ─ most of the time you don’t even know what the ad is about until it’s over. Sometimes you have to watch it a few times to figure it out!
Look in your newspaper, your local penny saver, look at ads in magazines ─ most of these are institutional advertisements. There is no call to action and usually no compelling reason to do business with the advertiser.
Now look at your ads. I'm sorry, but I’ll bet they're institutional…and I bet they aren't working for you. Why do companies do this? Why do YOU do this?
Well, it all started when advertising agencies came up with a way they could stay in business without being held accountable by their customers.
They weren't trying to promote actually sales, so how could the results be quantified?
You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Institutional advertising also allows an agency to keep coming up with different ad campaigns for the client. After all, you need to constantly change the message right? Wrong, not if you are measuring your response and your message is working. To agencies, new campaigns mean new initiatives and new initiatives mean new billings and new billings mean new cars, houses, boats and fabulous things ─ but for the advertisers… not for the business owner.
This type of advertising has even spawned awards ceremonies for the agencies based on all sorts of criteria about the ads. The bad news is nobody gets an award on how much product or services the ad sold, and isn’t that why you’re in business?
Do you remember years ago when General Motors had the “heartbeat of America” ads running for Chevy trucks? It was a $60,000,000 campaign. Everybody loved it, and it ran for a long time. The agency that developed it won awards for it, it was huge.
Did you know that Chevy actually LOST market share in their truck division while those ads were running?
Evidently big companies with big ad budgets can afford to run these types of ads, and in some cases this may make sense.
However, you are running a small business and you can't afford to copy these big companies. You need to focus on direct marketing methods in your advertising because you need an immediate response!
If your advertising and marketing does not have some kind of call to action in it, you have failed before you started.
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Direct Marketing