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

 

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