Adding Direct Response into Small Business Advertising

Making an immediate sale isn’t the goal of all small business advertising. Many forms of advertising and promotion are incorporated for the sole purpose of building a brand image, or increasing and maintaining customer’ faith in a company, product, or service and also use marketing materials in order to gain an immediate response and if all goes well, produce sales – all of which I’m going to cover here.

There’s many forms of direct response marketing, from the short-form advertising copy (such as print ads, TV commercials, radio spots, contextual PPC advertising, etc.) to the longer marketing messages like text-heavy, full page, advertorials and the Dale Carnegie-style sales letters. These are all valid ways to get your message across, and if you’ve spend more than ten minutes in marketing then you know who you’re selling what to, and which form best suits your advertising needs. – another important factor is when your audience is affected by your message.

The Right Message To The Right Market In The Right Media At The Right Time

These four factors judge the success of any direct response advertising campaign. – and we’ll briefly cover all four below:

Message: It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is if you can’t effectively communicate its advantages over what the competition is offering – you won’t get many, if any sales. If you want an immediate spur into action from your audience then you must appeal to them on many levels, especially an emotional one. I’ll explain crafting an attention grabbing message that closes the deal later.

Market: As I wrote earlier, even if you offer a great product or service, and even if you have a great message, it really doesn’t matter if you’re targeting the wrong audience. Don’t bring coal to Newcastle. If you don’t know who your target market is before starting a direct response campaign to reach them, then you need to fall back on the basics of your business’ marketing plan. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you’ll never be able to put together an effective direct response message.

Media: Market research really comes to light when choosing what type of media to convey to your target audience based on the demographics of that group. Determining the effectiveness of different types of media depends on who your target market is. Some people are more influenced by direct mail, and some by print advertising, and others prefer online marketing strategies such as email and banner ads. Just like getting ready for a speech, you need to know who your audience is going to be in order to create an effective impact with your message and direct response method.

Moment: Timing is just as important as targeting the right audience with the proper message using the correct form of media. What’s the right time, you ask? It’s when your target audience is ready to make a purchase, and not when you’re ready to make them a sale. You’re always in sell mode, but even after choosing the proper demographics your customers may not always be ready to buy.

Incorporating these factors: Message, market, media, and moment, can ensure that your direct response campaign produces positive results and a good return on investment by targeting the right people that are ready and willing to buy from your business right now.

Accomplishing this can be done in multiple ways. You can keep in touch with prospective and current customers via a series of email messages using auto-responder software. If they’re more prone to offline marketing, then by running regular advertisements in the media channels that have the most influence in your targeted demographic is a good way to reach them.

But any way you look at it, these are the 4 components of successful small business advertising… By getting all 4 of these factors right, you can begin to see an immediate increase in the effectiveness of your small business ads.

You’ve just read a small segment of the free guide titled “How to Use Direct Response Small Business Advertising to Grow Your Sales and Profits.” The guide is available for free – along with several other resources for small business owners – when you sign up for my small business advertising e-course… To learn more about how to massively increase the sales in your business through smart advertising and marketing, click the link to grab your FREE Small Business Advertising Course…