What is Direct Marketing?

If you’re a small business that has never heard of direct marketing, then you’re missing out.

For a small business, it can be difficult to know how much time should be allocated to marketing your services.

It can be time-consuming, costly and difficult to execute successfully with so many different methods available. One of the best and most efficient methods of advertising is known as direct marketing, but what is it?

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing is where your business makes direct contact with existing and potential customers. This differs from other forms of marketing because it targets specific groups and individuals which allows for personalised adverts. Businesses usually select targets based on area, gender, age, race or other collected details. This increases the conversion rate as the target audience has a higher chance to buy in the first place. Now we know what direct marketing is, it’s time to look at why it’s more cost effective than other forms.

Direct marketing is the ideal marketing method for businesses with limited marketing budgets. By personalising your marketing, you are increasing the likelihood of a potential client using your business. This is because you are directly targeting a specific group of people. A great example of this would be to target households with a car for car insurance.

Obviously if they have a car then they will require car insurance, it’s a legal requirement. It would make little sense and would be a waste of money if you were to target households without a car for car insurance. This use of knowledge of the customers is what makes direct marketing so powerful compared to other forms.

Direct Marketing and Pay Per Click

Traditionally direct marketing would involve using methods such as cold calling or mailing leaflets to target specific areas. However, nowadays we can direct market through the internet. In 2014 digital advertising was the fastest growing category of expenditure with an increase of 16.1% in spending. A third of businesses also said that digital marketing will account for 75% of their spending within the next five years.

This is where pay per click (PPC) advertising comes in useful. PPC advertising allows you to specifically target your online adverts to certain groups. Not only does this help reduce your ad spend, but it also helps increase your conversion rates. Pay per click direct marketing is also a great way to gather information regarding your adverts. Using the various online management tools included, you can A/B test your ads and find out which is better. With this information, you can then cut your underperforming ads and allocate more money to the successful ones.