5 Secrets To Direct Response Marketing For Small Businesses

If you're in business, then direct response marketing is perhaps the most important skill you have to learn if you hope to be successful.

Why?

Because it's the most powerful and effective form of marketing there is, and marketing is the most important activity any business owner can engage in - because without marketing, you don't make sales.

No sales, no profits.

No profits... and very quickly you have no business. Which is not an ideal situation for most business owners, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, what is direct response marketing and how does it differ from the usual kind of marketing most business owners are engaging in now?

Here are the top 5 important differences.

Direct response marketing is measurable. By this I mean every ad, every postcard, every email and everything else you put out there to promote your business can be tracked and measured to see what kind of response it's getting (and if you can't measure its response you shouldn't be doing it until you can measure it - whoever said "half of your advertising is wasted, but you just don't know which half" was an idiot).

Direct response marketing is testable. This is a natural consequence of by-product of the previous point. Because you can measure responses, you can test two different pieces (ads, letters, postcards, whatever), and see which one does the best. And that's the one you go with - assuming it's also making you a profit!).

Direct response marketing MUST contain specific elements without which it's unlikely ever to work (and even if it does, you won't know it). Many business owners overlook this because they don't feel comfortable with the approach. But for it to be testable, it's got to have common elements that CAN be tested - variables - that can be tracked and tested (e.g. headlines, specific offers, calls to action, and so on).

Direct response marketing is specific. By this I mean every ad or letter or other piece has a definite purpose for existing - it's there to get the reader (or listener or watcher) to take an action of some kind - to buy, sign up for an email list, things like that. The point is it's NOT "image advertising" placed just to increase "awareness" of the "brand". Most business owners don't have a brand worthy of the name until they've established a reputation for quality and service, and the way to do that is with direct response marketing.

Direct response marketing doesn't look like marketing. This is a subtle but important point. We are nowadays swamped with marketing messages and entreaties to buy stuff. Whichever way you turn, wherever you look, you're getting marketing shoved in your face trying to get you to part with your money. And like any persistent noise or odour... we become inured to it. We turn off. So direct response marketing looks like editorial or informational material - something that has intrinsic value in and of itself. Bottom line: if your ad or sales letter look like marketing pieces... then don't be surprised if no one reads your marketing and no one buys your products.

The majority of small businesses are nervous of direct response marketing because it's both outside their conmfort-zone but also way outside their industry-norm.

And rather than see this as being a most excellent reason for doing it all by itself, they prefer instead to toe the line and stick with what they know and feel comfortable with.

That's OK, of course, so long as they accept if they keep doing what they're doing now, they're going to keep getting broadly the same results; and if they keep doing what their competitors are doing, why, then they shouldn't expect any better results than the guy down the road gets, either.