Marketers are continuing to making the same mistake. They focus all their efforts on branding at the expense of a far more important contributor to business growth - lead generation. In doing so, they are losing out on the chance to increase their revenue by so much.
Direct response marketing builds ROI quickly
There is a clear difference between the need for small businesses to invest their money in direct response marketing and major brands that can afford to focus on developing their branding. Direct response marketing builds your business quickly, as it demands an immediate response, so it results in quick sales. It also focuses on lead nurturing, using the applied knowledge that if you look after your customers, they will become repeat customers. Branding is a strategy to focus on when you are playing the long game - once you've built up your business and can afford to wait for the outcome.
Emotional direct response marketing is the one of the most powerful way to appeal to a potential customer. In your marketing, you should aim to make the customer aware of a problem in their lives, by appealing to their deepest needs and wants. You can even evoke that problem yourself by using words and images that elicit a hunger and thirst response. Your advertisement should then aggravate that problem before instantly providing the remedy.
Weight loss advertising is a strong example of this. By including real-life testimonials, where the clients discuss the previous weight struggles they went through, with before and after images to illustrate the point, you are appealing to the emotional response of viewers to identify with these case-studies. By then providing the solution to the problem, in the form of the product or service, alongside their new trim image providing an endorsement, you are appealing to the nature of viewers with the same problem to want to emulate the success of these people that they identify with.
Data capture and analysis is yet another important aspect of marketing that is being neglected by marketers. Businesses are missing out on so much by not focusing on something so simple. If businesses find out the specifics of location, age, gender and so on, that are buying into their service, they can make effective use of marketing analytics technology to analyse that data, in order to pinpoint the demographics of their audience and tailor their advertising to attract more clients in the same demographic groups. The more pinpointed your demographics are, the more that you can personalise your marketing to each customer that has responded to indicate that they want to find out more.
By capturing customer data, you can continue to develop a relationship to create long-term customers
The most effective way to use direct response advertising is to capture customer data from the outset so you can be aware of who your marketing is appealing to and tailor your marketing campaign accordingly. When your potential customers first respond to your advertising, by expressing an interest in your product or service through clicking a link or making a call, this is the perfect time to act.
By getting them to fill in a form with their demographics and contact details, not only will you have the important details of who you're appealing to at your disposal, you will be able to continue to contact the customers with special incentives to buy into your product whilst incidentally reminding them of your name at the same time. This is the start of the relationship that you are building with your customer which allows them to build trust and familiarity with you, which will result in them choosing you over your competitors in the future. It is all about getting them in the sales funnel and starting their customer journey with you.
The constant developments in marketing analytics technology mean that the ability to revolutionise your marketing strategy is at your fingertips and it will do the hard work for you. Yet, industry statistics indicate that 90% of businesses still don't even have simple data capture forms on their websites. In addition, they are not taking advantage of the many offline lead capture possibilities.
The focus for companies is too often on getting the big numbers in, when the priority should be on building a personal relationship to enable customer retention through direct response tactics. When people are on your website, they are expressing an initial interest in what you have to offer. You are missing a trick if you haven't thought of a creative way to get them to fill in their contact details so that you can follow up with further advertising. You've probably been asked to fill in your email address when you want to download an e-book - this is a perfect example. Strike while the iron is hot – when customers are expressing an interest, offer them something that will keep them interested. It’s a basic step to not only generating numbers but putting faces, names, ages and personal interests to those numbers.
Simply getting your brand name out there into the public's consciousness isn't enough. You need to emotionally connect with your target audience to really seep into their subconscious. When you measure the results of the audience that you have emotionally connected with, then you will be able to capitalise on your marketing at a very fast pace and build a strong audience for your brand.
To discover the best lead generation tips to quickly boost your ROI, download our free e-book.
