How does a company know if it is staged for complete success when it comes to direct and digital marketing strategies?
What is a good way to identify gaps in your marketing strategy, to repair mistakes that testing brought about? What was learned from the last campaign that made your strategy not as effective?
Granted you have created testing points, such as response, communication channel tracking and website traffic. If you’re using direct mail as one channel, there are many testing methods available, so don’t hesitate to ask.
Your website is the hub where you set the rules of engagement. Create great content and show creativity and design. Today its gathering data from call-to-action pages, website landing pages and other creative tools you are using to capture more data.
Think of your website as the front door to your business. Studying your website trafficking data. Do you to test more assumptions. For example, if you determine there is a significant rise in traffic on a certain day of the week, it’s an opportunity to learn more about your customers and prospects.
More than likely, your website is where you send all the “clicks” you collect from your multi-channel inbound marketing strategy. A percentage of these visitors (the click throughs) can respond to each message you send leaving a trail of data to analyze.
Striving for engagement requires a solution.
A great takeaway from website analytics is centered around these two direct marketing words: attention and attraction. The copy, design, the selected communication channel and the offer you make is the attention. Something stopped them – it caught their eye to look again.
The eye catcher may be in the copy within the headline, sub headline or a call-to-action. A short video, a post on social media or simple colorful landing pages can be the attraction. That’s the point where design and creative copy, are used to make that last push to get an answer.
Here’s the reality check from the above paragraph.
- It’s all about attention and attraction
- The analyzed results are what it takes to make the marketing team better and smarter
- Each person on your team has traveled many times down the same path as your visitors
- The offer was right on based on how many visitors went to the landing page
One last thought. What stopped the other visitors from moving forward that went to the landing page?
What’s marketing without data and engagement?
Not everyone is a solution provider. But some can be trained to offer solutions. Going down the path is a game. It’s a game of clues. People that enjoy video games may be just the right type of person for your marketing team.
They are familiar with trial and error. The path is familiar. It’s basically a one-way conversation. There is little engagement. Reactive marketing is a waste of your marketing dollars. Reactive marketing is just simple. It’s a yes or a no. Today’s reactive advertising represents what we see on TV, read in newspapers, printed on paper, digital, and what we hear on the radio.
What present advertisers are doing is a simple numbers game. However, it is a game. These companies know buyers are there, so they shout, and hopefully create a demand. Do I have to tell you that it works? But who has that type of budget? Maybe AT&T. It’s just not right for a small business.
A solution of any proportion can ignite an engagement.
Engagement represents what people can do with data. As any experienced small business owner or manager know, people that purchase have a need and want to buy.
Direct marketers know something about customer needs and how to get the attention.
Direct marketers will likely build customer profiles to attract more business. Add more communication with people who showed some attention in the latest message. Try to understand why some people didn’t connect. The ones who were pulled, drawn, enticed, fascinated, or tempted by the message, but did not engage.
Whenever you want to communicate with these potential customers, keep on collecting data. Offers are used to entice a certain segment a special deal such as two for the price one.
Eventually, your company can show hyper-relevant content that fits your customers and prospects. Some of the people clicking on those call-to-actions for more information will eventually do business with you.
Now you know what a solution provider in direct marketing can do for a small business. They are always on top of problems with the right answers to create engagement.
Here are a few ways to set the table for future customer gains.
“A solution provider can eliminate a lot of busy work.” Striving for more engagement requires a solution person in your marketing or sales team. A great takeaway we learned from website analytics is centered around these two direct marketing words: attention and attraction. The copy, design, the selected communication channel, and the offer you make is the attention. Something stopped them – it caught their eye to look again.
“You Don’t Need to Sell Everything in One Day!” Direct marketing using the direct mail channel tends to fall into one of two categories: selling something today or setting the stage for selling sometime soon. This “setting the stage” or lead generation tool is what direct marketing mail does with remarkable efficiency and finesse.
Sometimes lead generation can be a simple, single-step activity. Such as a press release, invitation to attend an event, request a free sample, or register online for this or that. At other times, when you’re trying to create a relationship or deal with educating your market about a complex product or service, lead generation can be a multi-step activity.
“When you hear the phrase in my expert opinion do you start trembling?” Somehow, “expert and opinion” means you’re going to hear or see it no matter what. Before you can eradicate those two words from your brain registry file, you’ll hear what you don’t want to hear.
However, with so many ideas in marketing, if you hear “You don’t need another idea — you need better execution.” Then that statement makes perfectly good sense. People love to take shortcuts in marketing and advertising.
” How to formulate your advertising and selling teams to work together and in return, increase your revenue.” Think of marketing as being everything leadership can do to make money by selling goods or services. Using that premise, your advertising is a tactical tool and a subsection of marketing. Selling (sales) is also a subsection of marketing.
Direct marketing and customer-centric marketing are two main strategies to use for sustained growth and revenue in most small B2B companies. These two strategies, coupled with your sales and marketing team, are both unique and can add dollars to the bottom line.