Give Direct Marketing For Small Business a Serious Look

Immediate ROI is the Difference

With branding campaigns, it is difficult to assess immediate return on investment (ROI). What could you reasonably look at?

• Promotions, though they are not quite the same thing
• Attitudinal maps, but they take some time to register
• Online buzz, but it might not be representative of your target and require good metrics (read: expensive) to determine whether it is positive or negative buzz
• Sales, but this method is slow (though not that slow; John Philip Jones in his book “When Ads Work” tracked weekly sales, so given a good sample of sales points, that might work well)

 

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Nevertheless, the degree of crossover disciplines is high and useful.

What You Need to Know

Direct marketing is perhaps the most affordable, approachable kind of advertising that an owner of a small or medium-sized business can do. There are several factors:

• It delivers immediate and visible results. Depending on what your goals are, any direct marketing effort ought to deliver results (or not) right away.
• There are dozens of different avenues along which to launch a campaign, so you can test any or many of them. For example:

  • Advertising on free sites like Craigslist
  • Email campaigns
  • Fliers and postcards sent to potential clients
  • Local search
  • Direct mail (bulk and/or personalized)
  • There is the possibility of testing your message often. Every form of direct marketing offers the possibility of A/B and more splits. In many cases, you just need to think strategically:

    • Have a completely different ad every day in Craigslist and measure response
    • Send completely different creative to subdivisions of your email or mail list
    • Create half a dozen fliers and postcards, and track results
    • Try a dozen different ads in local search
    • It has realistic minimum budgets. While it is always advisable to set up a realistic budget (given a set of goals), many direct marketing media do not have high bars:

      • Craigslist is either free or costs a nominal amount
      • Email is free through services like MailChimp
      • Fliers, letters and postcards cost anywhere from $0.50 to maybe $2.00 each, but you could send 100 just to “test the waters” and project results from there
      • Local search begins at around $0.70 per click, so you could reasonably spend $300 a month and have enough clicks to project results

       

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Bottom line: Direct marketing—often derided and ridiculed as being the land of the Ginsu knives and Snuggies—deserves a much more serious look.

• It is used by large companies everywhere profitably
• It brings useful disciplines that will improve every facet of your marketing efforts
• It can be tailored to suit the needs of small and medium-sized businesses

 

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Other articles by Marcelo:

What Do Rodney Dangerfield and B2B Advertising have in common?

Marketing Campaign Delivers a Decisive Strike

Apology marketing campaign fails to reach shoppers
In Marketing There are no “Pros” in Reaction

Guerrilla Marketing, Promotion and Social Media

Three Essential Marketing Campaign Components

Create A Unified Strategic, Media and Creative Plan

Marcelo Salup‘s 30-plus-year career in advertising covers a wide range of everything. A wide range of roles–he began his career on the creative side, won two Addies, changed to media, included strategic planning and consumer insight and has been an agency owner several times. A wide range of venues: Spain, Latin America, international and the U.S. A wide range of clients that range from automotive to banking to electronics to fast food to soft drinks and much more. But can be summed up in four words “Only Performance is Real.” His website can be found at www.marcelosalup.com.