Keyword of the Day

A lot of small business advertising isn’t meant to make an immediate sale. 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.

Direct response marketing can take on many various forms, from the long messages like full page, text-heavy ads, advertorials and the Dale Carnegie-style sales letter, to the smaller, short-form advertising (such as print ads, contextual PPC advertising, radio spots, TV commercials and the like). 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

All four of these factors are important to the success of any direct response advertising campaign – and we’ll briefly cover all four below:

Message: If you’re unable to effectively tell your audience about the advantages of your product or service over your competition’s, then it doesn’t matter how awesome your product or service really is. – you won’t get many, if any sales. You need to appeal to people on several levels, especially on an emotional level if you want to spur them to action immediately. I’ll explain crafting an attention grabbing message that closes the deal later.

Market: Like I said, your product or service’s greatness, and even your message really mean zilch if it’s directed towards the wrong audience. In other words, don’t bring coal to Newcastle. Before producing a direct response marketing campaign, you need to know who your target audience is – and if you don’t already then you need to back up to the beginning of how your business does it’s marketing research. Knowing who you’re product or service appeals to is the only way to create 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. Depending on who your target market is, different media channels will be more – or less effective in reaching them. People may like direct mail over print advertising, or email over banner ads. Just as if you were preparing to give a speech, you have to know your audience in order to create a message and a method which will allow you to make the greatest possible impact.

Moment: Just as important as reaching the right audience using the right message in the correct form of media is making sure you do it all at the right time. So how can you tell when the right time is? When they want to buy, not when you want to sell. 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.

There are a few ways of doing this. You can keep in touch with prospective and current customers via a series of email messages using auto-responder software. If it’s more likely that your audience would go for offline methods, then by targeting the media channels that have the greatest influence on your target’s demographic area can ensure that your message is heard loud and clear.

But any way you look at it, these are the 4 componenets of successful small business advertising…

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 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…