What is Direct Response marketing?

There are broadly two types of marketing; Image Marketing (branding) and Direct Response Marketing.

The goal of Image Marketing (branding) is to remind customers and prospects about your company and the products and/or services you offer.

The idea is that the more times the market hears from you the more likely people are to have your company’s name at the top of their mind when they go to make a purchasing decision. The majority of advertising falls into this category, especially from national and international brands.

There’s no doubt that Image Marketing is effective, however it takes a lot of money and time. It requires you to saturate various types of advertising media e.g. TV, print, radio, Internet on a very regular basis and over an extended period of time. At the time of writing this post a good example is “ee” who have been advertising on the TV with Kevin Bacon.

The money and time involved are not a problem for big businesses as they have massive budgets. However, a problem arises when smaller businesses try to imitate big brands.

They tend to run very small campaigns which have no chance of working because they do not have have enough money to get into the mind of their target market. Keep in mind the same target market are being bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day from national and international brands.

The common feeling amongst small businesses is that “marketing doesn’t work”.

It’s not that small businesses don’t have a good brand, image or weak adverts…it’s just they do not have enough money to run their adverts enough times to make them stick.

Unless you have millions of pounds (or more likely tens of millions) in your marketing budget, you have a very high probability of failure with Image Based marketing. This is why we recommend all small/medium sized businesses should only be using Direct Response Marketing.

Direct Response Marketing is an approach to marketing based on getting  an immediate response from prospects. It can be online, offline or a mix of the two.

The response can be to buy the product, requesting more information or signing up to a mailing list. The types of response include picking up the phone, completing a coupon, returning a form in a pre-paid envelope or completing a form on a web page.

This form of marketing is different from other marketing for a number of reasons. I will be covering the various elements in future posts but the first is that responses can be measured and attributed to specific adverts or promotion.

This allows the business to assess and improve marketing with ongoing testing. Again, this suits small/medium sized businesses because is is lower risk.

As Accountants for North London we use Direct Response Marketing so sign-up for our newsletter and discover how your business can increase sales, improve profit margins and boost cashflow.