By Mark Bellini

As more and more businesses offer free educational content in order to attract more website visitors, it becomes necessary for you to take a more proactive approach when trying to convince potential customers to do business with you.

One way to get better results from your inbound / content marketing materials is to apply direct marketing techniques and try to build a relationship with those who’ve downloaded your content and have shown an interest in your products and services.

Direct marketing has been around for a long time and works very well for smaller businesses without large marketing budgets.

 

Here are 8 direct marketing techniques you can apply to your business:
1. Always ask people to take action
All of your website content, including blog posts and articles, should include a call-to-action.

This can be an offer to try your product, or to fill out a form and download a free e-book.

This helps to guide potential customers along your funnel, gain trust in you, and eventually purchase from you.

 

2. Offer incentives for immediate response
Potential customers need incentives to continue moving further along in their journey from prospects to paying customers.

 

Offering bonus gifts or discounts overcomes people’s tendency to procrastinate. The longer prospects interact with your content and marketing materials, the more likely they’ll be to respond to your promotional offers.

 

3. Always follow up
A potential client who responds to your ad, fills out a webform, or calls you should get immediate attention. He / she is obviously interested in your products or services.

 

Three ways to follow up include:
1- Create an email marketing campaign (autoresponder) that is triggered when someone enters their contact information in your webform.

 

2- Offer a free downloadable e-book or report to site visitors who fill out your opt-in form. This PDF file should cover a major issue that is related to products and services.

 

3- Send an information kit to people who contact you directly asking for more information.

 

4. Persuasive copywriting sets you apart from the competition.
As potential customers move further down your marketing funnel (sequence), they need to be persuaded to eventually try your product or service. That’s where copywriting becomes important.

 

Your promotional emails, sales pages, and offers need to appeal to people’ s emotions, and convince them that you have a solution to their problem. You also have to overcome their objections and procrastination.

 

This is an area of marketing where you need to be direct and really tell potential customers why they should do business with you.

A good copywriter will be able to create a well-structured sales argument that will position your product or service as the right choice for customers’ specific needs.

 

5. Avoid fancy design and excessive creativity.
Successful direct marketing follows certain formulas and structures that are proven to work.
The focus should always be on your message.

 

6. Make decisions based on results.
Direct marketing methods allow you to use data from different campaigns to see which ads, emails, and promotions perform better.

Having detailed data makes it easier to decide which marketing methods are working, and which methods should be abandoned.

 

7. Track every dollar spent on marketing.
It’s important to only use marketing tools and services that allow you to analyze the results of your ads, email campaigns, and other direct marketing efforts.

 

Digital marketing platforms offer metrics that allow you to measure practically anything you want. This can save you a lot of time and money trying to figure out the most effective ways to promote your business.

 

8. Direct marketing requires discipline.
Once your business becomes successful, it’s tempting to start getting creative with your marketing and ads. Unfortunately, this is where many small businesses run into problems.

 

Direct marketing methods work when they are used consistently. Changing your messages, logos, or trying to invest in marketing fads will dilute your unique advantage.

 

You will then have to compete with hundreds of other businesses using the same copycat strategies.
It’s much easier to stick with a small set of direct marketing techniques that give you a unique advantage and can be used over and over.

 

Direct Response Marketing Just Works
Direct marketing has been around for hundreds of years. The internet has made it even more powerful by allowing businesses to get detailed information on the performance of all their marketing campaigns.

 

While inbound / content marketing gets all the attention these days, it usually needs to be combined with direct marketing in order to be effective.

 

Smaller brands don’t have the luxury of waiting for customers to find them through SEO (search engine optimization) and search engine results.

Direct marketing helps you to directly target potential customers and get immediate results.

 

Mark Bellini – Freelance Copywriter and Marketing Editor

 

 Avoid These Common Marketing Mistakes!

Please visit WritingConversions.com and get your free report, 26 Marketing Mistakes & Simple Ways to Avoid Them: How to Attract Loyal Clients on a Small Budget.

Discover 26 of the most serious mistakes that entrepreneurs, small business owners, consultants, and other self-employed individuals routinely make when trying to promote their products and services.

You will also receive:

1. Weekly emails that will help you build a profitable marketing funnel
2. Tips to help you find competent and reliable freelance copywriters and consultants
3. Learn how to use direct marketing methods within your inbound funnel for more effective results
4. Bonus downloads that discuss best practices for building your own marketing funnel

 

 

Photo: Quinn Dombrowski

Inbound marketing (content marketing) is a highly effective way for small business owners to attract more website visitors.

Writing informative, helpful articles, blog posts, and reports helps you to become a trusted authority to potential customers as they learn more about you and the products and services you offer.

Unfortunately, many businesses take shortcuts in order to produce content quickly and cheaply.

These tactics are harmful in the long run, for two reasons:
1. Search engines like Google penalize sites with poorly written or plagiarized content. This prevents them from appearing in the top pages of search results.
2. Weak content won’t help you to be seen as an expert in your field. This will make it more difficult to convince prospects to do business with you.

 

Google Recognizes Good Content
In the early days of the internet, it was easy to get good rankings on Google by generating dozens of poorly written articles and blog posts filled with the right keywords.

Many businesses simply copied and pasted content from other sites, changing only a few words to deceive the search engines.
Today, Google has the technology to catch such tricks, and penalizes websites that use these tactics.

 

Websites can run into trouble for the following reasons:
⦁ Creating irrelevant, low quality content
⦁ Reusing content from other sites
⦁ Posting poorly structured content

 

Well-Written Content Prevents These Problems
The only way to get results from content marketing is to create informative content that discusses the challenges and questions your potential customers have about your industry, your products and services.

You need to see yourself as a publisher, and create a plan that lists the topics you plan to write about, the formats you intend to use. You also need a calendar that tells you when to upload each piece of content to your website.

 

Best Practices for Creating Effective Marketing Content
These guidelines will help you to produce quality website content that gets results:

⦁ Use keywords related to the questions and problems your potential customers routinely deal with
⦁ Write about topics that are relevant to your typical clients / customers
⦁ Make sure your articles and blog posts are easy to read and scan. Use subheadings, wide margins, and bullet points to make the text flow
⦁ Ask readers to take action. Whether it’s downloading a booklet, or scheduling a free appointment, always include a call-to-action at the end of every piece of content you create
⦁ Reuse your content in social media posts and email messages in order to spread your messages to the widest possible audience.

 

How to Consistently Create Quality Content
Creating articles, blog posts, and other forms of online content takes a lot of planning, research, and revisions.

It is possible to do some of the work by yourself. You may decide to write a draft of the blog posts you need, and then have an editor or writer revise and polish them.

You may also decide to outsource your content marketing efforts to one or more freelancers.

This is the best option if you simply don’t have the time or desire for researching and writing.

There are many competent freelance content writers / copywriters who can manage your inbound marketing needs for affordable monthly fees.

 

 

Content Marketing Works When Done Right
Getting the best results from inbound marketing requires well-planned, informative written materials.

Creating an inventory of informative content that helps your prospects and customers solve common problems will eventually get the attention of Google and other search engines.

This will help you to separate yourself from competitors who create low-quality, unfocused website content.

As we’ve discussed, taking shortcuts, such as copying others’ content or buying articles from cheap content agencies, actually hurts your website rankings.

This also hurts your business in the long-run, if website visitors get a poor impression of your credibility and skills.

Investing in a good freelance writer, or a competent marketing editor, will lead to more website traffic, email subscribers, and paying customers.

Good writing still matters!

 

 Avoid These Common Marketing Mistakes!

Please visit WritingConversions.com and get your free report, 26 Marketing Mistakes & Simple Ways to Avoid Them: How to Attract Loyal Clients on a Small Budget.

Discover 26 of the most serious mistakes that entrepreneurs, small business owners, consultants, and other self-employed individuals routinely make when trying to promote their products and services.

You will also receive:

1. Weekly emails that will help you build a profitable marketing funnel
2. Tips to help you find competent and reliable freelance copywriters and consultants
3. Learn how to use direct marketing methods within your inbound funnel for more effective results
4. Bonus downloads that discuss best practices for building your own marketing funnel

 

 

 

Do you need help fixing poorly structured  or ineffective content or copywriting?

 

You post a bunch of articles, blog posts, and social media posts.

Your website starts showing up on internet search results as you become a respected guru in your industry. Your website starts attracting thousands of visitors. Most of them become loyal customers and give you great referrals.

Your business becomes highly successful.

According to many digital marketing experts, content marketing will do all this for you, without the need for traditional advertising and aggressive marketing techniques.

Unfortunately, this is simply not true for most small businesses.

While a large, established company might attract a lot of sales leads through a passive, inbound / content marketing strategy, smaller businesses need to find more proactive ways of attracting customers.

 

This means that businesses still need to implement traditional marketing techniques to get the best results from their content marketing. Small businesses need to go after clients and customers – not simply offer free educational content. That’s the only way to stand out from your competition.

 

 

Your Content Needs to Solve Relevant Problems

The whole point of content marketing is to gain the trust of potential customers by providing them with useful information that helps them solve common problems in their industry.

Creating relevant articles, blogs, and e-books also attracts the attention of search engines by showing them that you are in expert in your field.

That’s why it’s a waste of time producing a bunch of unfocused, poorly researched content, hoping that it’s going to improve your ranking on Google.

Irrelevant content also attracts less website visitors who are willing to give you their contact information in exchange for free downloads.

The only way to make content marketing work is by producing content that provides answers to the questions your potential customers ask.

Answering the right questions consists of creating articles, blog posts, or videos around the keywords used by prospects during their online searches.

 

 

Content Marketing Needs to Supported by Traditional Marketing

Just because you’ve created a bunch a free content doesn’t mean thousands of people are suddenly going to visit your website and interact with you.

Unless your business is widely known in your industry, you will have to make use of traditional direct marketing techniques to separate yourself from hundreds of other competitors who are also offering free educational content.

Small businesses need to work with professional copywriters to create promotional content, such as landing pages, email messages, and online ads, that generates more website traffic and email signups.

The only difference between this form of direct marketing and traditional direct response methods is that the ads you place will promote your free content and downloadable reports, instead of directly promoting your products and services.

Combining inbound content marketing with outbound direct marketing techniques makes the best use of both digital and traditional marketing techniques.

You won’t just passively upload content to your site and hope that people notice it. At the same time, your direct marketing promotions won’t seem overly aggressive or pushy.

 

 

Conclusion

Potential customers expect to get free information when they visit your website. They can visit your site, download your booklet, and leave your site in a matter of minutes, without even noticing your name or what services you offer.

That’s a major problem with content marketing.

It’s up to you to pursue those who show some interest in your content, and use direct marketing efforts to build a relationship and eventually persuade them to buy from you.

The best way to do this is to offer a free report or booklet that helps potential customers solve a major problem. This downloadable content becomes available once people enter their contact information on your web form.

Today the use of marketing automation software makes it easy to plan and create complete funnels that manage your educational content and   direct marketing campaigns.

These tools ensure that you get something out of your content marketing. Otherwise, you are simply giving away your knowledge for free.

 

 Avoid These Common Marketing Mistakes!

Please visit WritingConversions.com and get your free report, 26 Marketing Mistakes & Simple Ways to Avoid Them: How to Attract Loyal Clients on a Small Budget.

Discover 26 of the most serious mistakes that entrepreneurs, small business owners, consultants, and other self-employed individuals routinely make when trying to promote their products and services.

You will also receive:

1. Weekly emails that will help you build a profitable marketing funnel
2. Tips to help you find competent and reliable freelance copywriters and consultants
3. Learn how to use direct marketing methods within your inbound funnel for more effective results
4. Bonus downloads that discuss best practices for building your own marketing funnel

 

Get Better Returns on Your Content Marketing: Get a  Digital Marketing Plan!