Nine Types of Direct Marketing

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing is a promotional method of marketing, communicating your company’s product, or service, directly to your targeted potential customer. The goal of direct marketing is to persuade audiences to take action by visiting the company’s website, sign up for a mailing list or call for more information. The ultimate goal is to get the sale. Read on to find out more about the different types of direct marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful form of direct marketing that uses email to promote your business’ products or services. It allows you to create targeted and personalised campaigns helping you to build relevant relationships with your customers.

40% of B2B marketers say that email newsletters are their most effective form of marketing, with 73% of millennials preferring email communication. A successful marketing campaign will reach the right audience and is easy to measure by tracking delivery and bounce rates, unsubscription, click through and open rates.

Text Message Marketing

Companies often get a higher response rate with text message marketing because of how often consumers use their mobile devices. The effectiveness of your campaigns can be monitored so you can measure its success:

• How many people received your SMS campaign
• The response, click-through and conversion rates
• The exact cost per sale or activity

A well-executed text message marketing campaign will help generate revenue and new business.

Direct Response Marketing

Direct response marketing can involve advertising a business through television, radio or multimedia. This style of marketing is convenient for companies and consumers because of the popularity of televisions and radios, which makes it easy for the consumer to listen, watch or read about the company.

Some examples of direct-response marketing are:

• TV commercials
• Radio advertisements
• Newspapers
• Magazines

Direct Mail

Direct mail allows a company to send information about products, special offers, services and sales to a street address via the postal service. Direct mail marketing can be personalised to the customer giving flexibility with individual offers, a targeted list and the creative design.

Some examples of direct mail are:

• Letters
• Flyers
• Brochures
• Postcards
• Coupons
• Catalogues

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a powerful tool to reach prospects and customers. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn enable people to discover, learn about, follow and shop from brands. Marketing on social media can bring success to your business, creating devoted brand followers and even driving leads and sales.

Social media is constantly changing and evolving: new features and platforms emerge every day. Good social media marketing will:

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate and boost conversions
• Encourage relationships with customers

Content Marketing

Content marketing provides value to an organisation’s target audience through content that informs, answers audience’s questions, motivates, entertains, inspires and builds trust. Failure to create content that aligns with these objectives could result in missing out on winning potential audiences.

Content is king because it creates awareness and generates quality leads which encourages healthy sales growth. Properly executed content will drive traffic to your audience on your business’s website, which is ultimately where they will convert into leads and then sales.

Print Advertising

Companies use print advertising to promote products and services in newspapers, magazines, brochures, fliers, newsletters, coupons and postcards. 

Print advertising may have declined in popularity with the rise of digital media, however, the effectiveness of print can’t be discounted. Print media is the most successful when it is a part of your marketing mix in conjunction with digital marketing.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing is the direct marketing of goods or services to potential customers over the telephone, Internet, or fax. It can be an effective small business marketing tool when done correctly. However, the intrusive nature of telemarketing, has given rise to a growing backlash against this direct marketing practice.

Direct Selling

Direct selling requires a sales representative selling products or services to customers in person. Products through direct sales are not typically found in traditional retail locations: it often means a sales representative will visit a potential customer in their home to persuade them to purchase a product or a service. Direct selling allows businesses to create real connections with potential customers.

How To Find Your Target Audience

Your target audience is the specific group of people who need your product or service. They will be grouped by age, gender, location, interests, income and more. To determine your target audience, you need to analyse the data from consumer engagements to evaluate current buyer trends.

• Who already buys your product?
• Analyse competitors
• Create personas
• Define who is NOT your target audience
• Update data continuously

Why use Romax’s direct marketing services?

Romax provides clients with data-driven services. Our direct marketing services focus on improving return on investments (ROIs) by using in-depth industry knowledge and expertise to develop a customised strategy.

Romax uses online and offline personalised direct response marketing that uncovers your target audience to increase response rates and boost return on investment. Using your client’s preferred communication channel ensures continuity in message and brand for maximum impact and better results. 

Here at Romax, we are experts in direct marketing and much more. Our team of communications experts will deliver smarter customer communications that build bespoke workflow systems to help you reach your customers, either through print, digital or SMS.