Direct marketing is arguably one of the oldest forms of promotion. Modern marketers are understandably unsure about how it fits into a digital-first world, but in this blog we'll cover some ways that this tried and true tactic can still be used to great success!
Contents
What is Direct Marketing?
Modern Direct Marketing in Practice
Types of Direct Marketing
Direct Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages
Direct Marketing Examples
Direct Marketing Tips to Get Started
What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing can be described as “any marketing that relies on direct communication or distribution to individual consumers, rather than through a third party such as mass media”. (Investopedia). Today, email and social media could be consider forms of direct marketing.
Historically, direct marketing was the only real form of marketing available before tech solutions burst onto the screen. It relied mostly on mail: catalogues, flyers, brochures, etc to reach consumers far and wide. And it was certainly the only way that companies could hope to get in front of larger audiences — say those that lived in remote or inaccessible areas — who weren't an option for door-to-door selling.
The world of a direct marketer doesn’t involve big-budget advertising, whether it be TV, print, splashy billboards, or multi-faceted PR campaigns.
Rather, this approach is all about creating a direct interaction with the consumer. Expensive, mass market and vaguely targeted advertising campaigns using a middleman are out, relying instead on precision targeting.
Modern Direct Marketing in Practice
So, how does direct marketing differ today? Direct marketing campaigns have greatly evolved as part of the modern marketing mix, embracing innovative technologies, like social listening and market research platforms — like the Meltwater Media Intelligence Suite.
But even with high-tech solutions, the basic principle of direct marketing remains the same: a promotional strategy that sends messages directly to the consumer, and typically seeks to elicit a sale via direct response.
In the before-times it may have involved a coupon delivered by direct mail that took weeks or months from the time of order through to successful completion of delivery to the client. Now it may encompass a toll-free phone number or website link on a social media post, where orders can sometimes be fulfilled in mere minutes or hours. The potential for rapid response is one of the many advantages of marketing today.
Types of Direct Marketing
As marketing trends evolve, we can expect direct marketing channels to continue to change, especially with a growing online-first consumer base. Here are some of the most common direct marketing strategies:
In specific demographic areas, marketers may find that printed catalogs and direct mail still have a place. But there's no denying that the tide has shifted away from print advertising and snail-mail types of promotions. Most marketing firms today do favor digital channels, but again, it's important to understand your customer. In particular when it comes to elderly consumers, perhaps in upscale neighborhoods, printed travel brochures and product catalogues may still go a long way toward inspiring a sale.
Tip: Use a consumer insights tool to enhance your marketing strategy, and improve ROI
Telemarketing
While there may be decreasing willingness on the part of consumers to answer unknown phone calls, or respond to marketing texts, telemarking remains a heavily-used form of direct marketing.
That said, the rise of call-blocking and spam caller-recognition technology may mean that traditional telemarketing is on the road to losing its advantage.
Retargeting
Highly targeted social media ads via platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others are also widely used today. Retargeting campaigns remind past visitors to an e-commerce website to return and make a purchase, or perform another action such as sign up for an email list.
Conversational marketing
With new AI tools available to marketers today, conversational marketing has surged in popularity. Utilizing bot responses to common customer questions or complaints, this type of direct marketing can either help answer questions quickly, or connect customers to human agents for more complex issues that need solving.
WhatsApp has made a name for itself as a useful channel for conversational marketing, in particular for small businesses. Here are just a few examples of how direct marketing can be done on WhatsApp:
- Coffee shops posting menus and accepting take-out orders
- Dog groomers taking bookings
- A maternity goods shop posting special offers and taking orders from its customer base of new moms
- A real estate agent posting details of new property listings in a specified area
Source: WhatsApp
Tip: Be aware of untargeted use of all of these channels, especially on a frequent basis. When used incorrectly, this form of promotion merely becomes junk or spam and will not be read. Few things will alienate potential new customers more than bombarding them with irrelevant marketing messages.
Direct Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages
| Advanatages | Disadvantages | |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | More efficient | Can be time-consuming |
| #2 | More personalized | Has a negative perception |
| #3 | Easy to measure | Doesn't support an up-market strategy |
Direct Marketing Advantages
Here are the main advantages of having a direct marketing strategy as part of your marketing approach.
More cost effective
Targeting a specific audience that you know is likely interested in your product or service means less time or budget wasted on large-scale advertising placement costs.
More personalized
Extremely high levels of personalization are possible with direct advertising. Offers may be far more tailored when you know things like:
- What work people do
- The car they drive
- What sports they play
- What influencers they follow
- Where they like to go on holiday
Easy to measure
Because direct marketing often revolves around special offers, it is relatively easy to measure the success of the campaign compared to traditional advertising. Tracking for directly marketing campaigns may include:
- A toll-free number
- A dedicated email marketing address
- A dedicated postal address for direct mail responses
- A coupon code
- A click-through to a specific landing page
If you’re effectively managing and monitoring your response rate you should be able to produce valuable data to help future campaigns. Ideally you'll also get conversions in the way of opt-ins to future marketing messages, and therefore more cross-selling opportunities.
Tip: Check out our Meltwater suite for marketing professionals to help you measure your marketing campaigns.
Direct Marketing Disadvantages
Now, let's take a look at a few of the disadvantages of direct marketing.
Building a marketable database is time-consuming
Acquiring and maintaining useable databases for your direct marketing campaigns requires ongoing effort and investment. This has become even more pronounced in Europe as national legislators increasingly require a formal opt-in to make the process legal (GDPR). A lot of effort is required to get permission to include someone in your customer database and to ensure that opt-outs are taken off lists.
It gets a bad rap!
Despite various initiatives by associations to ‘clean up’ the industry, educate the consumer on their rights, and even to change the name of this form of marketing — for example, the Direct Marketing Association in the UK has rebranded itself as the Data and Marketing Association — many people still have a negative view of the approach and refuse to engage with what they regard as “junk” calls, emails, direct mail, and text messages.
It doesn't support positioning strategies
Direct marketers tend to concentrate on the marketing offer, whether product or price-focused, in order to solicit an immediate response. Therefore, it’s not well suited to marketing that requires brand and image building.
If brand building is a key goal of other marketing elements (e.g., print, television, or billboards), it’s important that your direct marketing strategy complements these efforts.
For example, if your brand-building promotes an upmarket image but your email marketing message uses a more casual tone, it will be at odds and present a confusing picture to consumers.
Direct Marketing Examples
Around the world, there are numerous examples of innovative and successful direct marketing campaigns. Here's a few that have caught our eye!
Royal Australian Air Force
Facing tough competition for new graduates from private sector employers, The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) decided a few years ago that it should turn to marketing to help recruit some of the country’s best and brightest young radio technicians.
To achieve this goal, the RAAF and its agency attended university events and engineering expos and distributed branded DIY FM radio kits to final year students. The kits had everything required to build the FM radio — except instructions. After using their skills and expertise to assemble the radios, students were able to tune into a dedicated radio channel that broadcasted information about radio engineering careers in the air force.
As a result, Air Force FM helped find the most skilled recruits and also put the RAAF brand into homes across the country. Talk about making waves (pun intended)!
Photo credit: GEORGE PATTERSON Y&R Melbourne
KitKat Chunky bar
Wanting to promote their Chunky bar, a brand extension of the traditional flat KitKat that breaks easily into quarters, Nestle owned KitKat created a direct mail piece that looked similar to the card that postmen leave behind when they’re unable to deliver a package.
While typically the message would say the package couldn’t be delivered because it’s too big for the letterbox, in this instance, the KitKat branded card said it couldn’t be delivered because it was ‘too chunky for your letterbox’.
Recipients were then directed to their local newsagent, where they could present the card to get their free Chunky bar. The promotion won a Wood Pencil Direct Mail award because it drove awareness, encouraged trial of the product, and had the added benefit of increasing foot traffic to local stores selling the item.
Photo credit: D&AD Awards
Harry’s grooming products
Harry’s — a company that sells personal grooming products in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. — decided to use a simple email approach to help it make inroads into the market when it was still a fledgling brand.
Twelve Harry’s employees sent promotional emails to everyone in their personal and professional network, with the request that each recipient, in turn, forward the email to their network. Because the emails were coming from a known person, there was high uptake.
In addition, when email recipients clicked the link in the email, they were taken to a Harry’s landing page. People who were willing to share the landing page on their personal social media platforms received free Harry’s products.
Within a week, the brand had a customer list of 100,000 people, which was achieved via very cost-effective direct marketing methods.
Direct Marketing Tips to Get Started
Learn from the experts as to how to enhance your direct marketing campaign and maximize your ROI. Here are some useful tips.
Define your target audience
Good direct marketers know that it’s all about narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. Be clear as to the audience you want to reach and then tailor your message accordingly. You can use consumer insights tools like the Meltwater audience insights platform to get enough information.
Consider factors such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Home language
- Profession
- Marital status
- Education level
- Income
- Ethnicity
- Religion
- Where they live
- Hobbies and interests
Depending on your requirements, your ideal target market definition may include all, or only one or two, of these. And, obviously, you should know their names and how to spell them correctly.
Personalize as much as possible
U.S. research published in 2018 by Epsilon, a company focused on data and technology, found that 80% of people are more likely to do business with an organization if it offers personalized experiences, and 90% indicating that they find personalization appealing.
Playing devil's advocate, Lester Wunderman, the legendary Madison Avenue ad man widely considered to be the doyen of direct marketers, believes that relevancy is more important than being personal. “Personal may offend. Relevancy never will,” he once advised — and he has a point, so we recommend walking the fine line between relevancy and personalization.
In some countries, readymade high-quality mailing lists are often available for purchase and could be quicker and more cost-effective than developing your own. But one of the disadvantages is that these may be limited to only a few parameters.
For example, you may get a mailing list of all medical doctors in a specific area, but this may not contain information on gender, age, marital status, etc. Legislations like GDPR put a stop to buying such lists in Europe, so bear that in mind too.
Ensure your plan is measurable
One of the benefits of direct-response marketing techniques is that they are so measurable.
Think about what you want to measure, how you want to measure it, how frequently you want to measure it, and what would represent success. For example, do you want to measure what response channels the target market prefers (e.g., dedicated phone number vs email marketing click-throughs vs direct mail responses)? Or is the only measurement you care about confirmed money-in-the-bank direct sales?
If the promotion is planned to run for a month, for example, perhaps measure the results weekly. That way you can tweak your offering according to what’s working and what’s not.
Also, be clear on what would constitute a successful promotion. If you get 1,000 people requesting a call-back by a sales consultant, is that good enough for you? Or is 3,000 product sales the minimum requirement?
Be specific with your approach
It's important to be clear and straightforward as to what you want the potential customer to do.
If you’re a teeth-whitening clinic, for example, you don’t want to simply say how wonderful your dentists are and suggest people visit the website sometime in the future to find out more. Instead, you want them to make an appointment now, via a specific response channel, to book a free consultation and redeem a 10% discount on their first treatment.
Use the data to improve future courses of action
You’ve measured everything during the promotion, so now you have invaluable data. Analyze it for key insights that will be useful in directing your future efforts.
If the key insight is “well, that was a waste of time”, don’t be too disheartened. Companies have spent millions on big-budget TV ad campaigns and run them for possibly years without knowing whether they’re achieving the desired results!
Direct marketing has the potential to be as successful now as it was well over a century ago when it was serving the needs of people in some of the remotest regions of the planet. Given the range of new communication channels that deliver increasingly efficient and cost-effective ways to link products with consumers, it has an undeniable benefit for marketing teams. Channels will continue to evolve, but the principle won’t: to communicate a relevant proposition directly and efficiently to an appropriately targeted customer in order to achieve the desired response.
Curious how you can use consumer insights to make better direct marketing decisions? Fill out the form below to see Meltwater consumer insights tools in action!
