Advertising

If you are a small business or entrepreneur, the type of marketing that you will be primarily using to get customers for your business is direct response marketing. So what exactly is direct response marketing? Direct response marketing is essentially a type of marketing designed to generate an immediate response from consumers.

This response can be easily measured and attributed to a specific advertisement that generated the results. Direct response marketing can be delivered through the various forms of media like direct mail, newspaper ads, magazine ads, direct response TV, direct response radio, print advertising, telemarketing, catalogs, and the Internet.

Direct response marketing differs from traditional image marketing done by the large companies like General Electric, Geico etc. The main purpose of image marketing is to increase awareness of the brand and remind the consumer that you exist in the marketplace.

The idea is that the more the advertisement is seen, the more it seeps into and becomes embedded in the consciousness and sub-consciousness of the consumer which hopefully will result in a purchase. Most of the image advertising that exists today is hard to measure because it doesn’t try to elicit an immediate response from the consumer.

For example, although the Geico commercials are quite funny, can the company actually measure the results of their effectiveness in terms of sales? No, they can’t. They can’t say hey with ran the commercial with the talking lizard and as a result we made X amount of sales. So why would they do it if they can’t measure the results? The immediate answer is they have the money to do so. Their marketing budget is huge and they figure it’s a sexy way to sell insurance. I mean how many people are going to watch and be interested in a commercial that blandly talks about the benefits of insurance?

Unfortunately, for many small business owners and entrepreneurs they become misguided and try to follow and emulate how “the big boys” do their marketing. Image marketing does not work for the small business owner or the entrepreneur mainly because it requires saturation of the market to reach the consciousness of the market you are trying to target. So save yourself the time, money and energy and don’t engage in this form of marketing unless you have millions in your marketing budget. Even then I would think twice about doing it.

Best of luck with your direct marketing approach.