What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing is any effort made in the marketing process to directly target and communicate your message to a potential end user. That means, your marketing “message” should have no opportunity to be missed because the end user will see and touch whatever it is you are communicating.
Door-to-door marketing is an example of direct marketing. At some point, the person living in the house will open the door and find some marketing collateral (another word for promotional piece) resting on the doorknob. Whatever happens after the end user sees and touches the collateral is outside the scope of direct marketing – the ultimate goal was to “personally deliver” specific marketing message to the target market.
Print advertising, for example, is not a direct marketing method because you cannot be certain if your ad will be seen by every person reading that publication – unless of course you tear out the ad and mail it to a specific group of recipients.
Direct Mail
Most people will recognize direct mail as the most popular direct marketing method, yet not always the most effective. Small businesses should only attempt using direct mail when they want to target a very specific market niche. Sending out 50,000 random promotional postcards to a designated postal area is not usually an effective direct mail practice – your collateral will likely be perceived as “junk mail.”
Why Direct Marketing?
Small businesses should look at “cost-friendly” direct marketing methods that tie in the use of email and the Internet to reach their target markets, commonly referred to as e-marketing or web-based marketing.
E-marketing allows you to deliver your message to the end user without incurring extensive printing, postage, delivery, or distribution charges. For example, you can buy an email list of qualified buyers and send them an “e-promotion” which directs them to your website to make the purchase.
As long as you abide by the laws of the CAN-SPAM Act, which establishes the requirements for businesses sending out commercial email, your e-marketing efforts should receive a higher rate of response from your end users.
Strategic Direct Marketing
Overall, direct marketing is “target” marketing. Assuming you have done a market research study, you should be able to define your target market (the people who will likely express an interest in what you have to offer) and work on creating an effective direct marketing campaign around these individuals.
Narrowing your target market down to those who are “qualified” buyers is challenging and may require the assistance of a marketing consultant or agency. Your target marketing within a community may total 102,756 people, for instance, yet the individuals who are most likely to buy from you directly can consist of just 2,375 people. Effective direct marketing will only address these 2,375 in order to convert these people into buyers of your product or service.
