It’s no secret that direct marketing gets a bad rap.
I’m all about giving value upfront and building longterm relationships with customers… But sometimes a well placed direct and to the point marketing message will slice through the noise, generate leads and facilitate quality conversations that quickly leads to business.
The problem is that most people don’t put much thought or skill into their messaging or lead generation process in general. They throw the kitchen sink feature list at anyone that will listen and hope one in a thousand people will buy.
An effective direct message, should not be about you - the person or business selling their product or service. It should focus on your customer, their challenge, and how you can solve that challenge.
I've found that it's useful to put in place values to guide online marketing approaches and ensure they hit the mark.
Overarching tenets that can guide your direct marketing and lead generation campaigns over the long term.
Over the years deploying marketing campaigns with clients we developed 3 tenets in this sense, to effective campaigns:
Tenet no.1) You must be able to test your approach.
What gets measured gets managed. By standardizing your direct marketing approach, whether that is via email, LinkedIn, Facebook ads or even your cold call sales script then you are able to split test different approaches and find for sure what’s working to get leads online or otherwise.
In the spirit of standardization, you're able to test multiple approaches quickly and find out which one is performing best.
Some approaches will perform poorly, some will be average and others will perform extremely well.
Test religiously how many messages you’re sending to achieve X amount of leads online and establish a conversion rate.
Once you find what is performing extremely well, stick with it and scale it. This leads me to my next tenet.
Tenet no. 2) You must be able to scale your approach.
A 10% conversion rate is great if you can send 1000 direct messages and generate 100 leads, but if you can only send 8 messages then, not so good.
If you want your business to scale, then your marketing needs to scale. This means you have two options:
Find something that is time-efficient, automated or outsource so you don’t have to spend a ton of time on it.
Tenet 3) You must know your target market better than they know themselves.
If you have enough experience in your field, then you'll naturally know what the key challenge or set of challenges are in your target market.
You should display this in your direct marketing messages to build instant rapport based on solving problems for your prospect.
Make it about them!
The goal of a direct marketing message is to get the prospect to read the next sentence, then to read the sentence after that, and after that.
Talking about their biggest challenges and how they can be solved, is far more likely to hook them to keep reading.
If you do this right, they make it to the end of your message and they may well take action.
Even direct marketing is about building a relationship. And the best business relationships are built on consistently solving problems for your customer - convey this in your communication with them.
If you can design your direct marketing approach around these 3 tenets, then you can begin to create a highly scalable, highly consistent, direct marketing and lead generation machine.