3 Marketing Tips To Live By

1. Hello… anyone out there??
When you send a direct mail campaign do you hit a void of emptiness? The least exciting part of most marketing campaigns is often the most critical: the target audience.

The best product, the best offer or the best of anything has little impact if you’re hitting the wrong target: Eskimos may not be interested in a free air conditioning service.

Thankfully there are effective methods to help get you on the right track. First, avoid the spray and pray approach. Let’s get the right marketing message into the right hands.

There are a number of data modeling services that will analyze your existing database. These modeling tools will review your entire database and return an informative analysis that will detail all the important characteristics of your best clients whether they are businesses or consumers. A good modeling tool will deliver information such as age, gender, radius from location, habits and other lifestyle details of your current clients. Then it determines your most common type of customer and your best type of customer.

The biggest feature is then obtaining a mailing list that matches only the characteristics of your best clients. So, that next marketing effort will hit only those most likely to buy and it will significantly increase your ROI; less mailing and more results.

2. Repeat your message. Repeat your message.
Ok, now we’ve targeted the right audience and now we’ve crafted the right message. The next step is to spread the word.

The estimate of how many advertisements a person is exposed to per day range from 500 to over 3000. This number represents a significant and specific challenge to your advertising efforts: get noticed and get remembered.

The best way to accomplish this is repetition. When developing your next marketing effort, whether it is a direct mail piece, an email blast or some other medium, develop your campaign with a multi touch approach. Scope out your process with the number of times you will hit your target, the gap between touches and what each message will offer.

3. 1 +2 = Triggered Marketing
With these two critical steps in place, we can now focus on a method that produces high response rates and reduces wasted efforts: Triggered Marketing.

All outside branding efforts should contain a strong call to action. Once prospects take some action, we can now react to that with a customized response that is triggered by that behavior. Let’s say an email blast or a direct mail effort successfully entices prospects to fill out a form on a web site. Once that form is completed we can now trigger a follow up based on that action. If the form enticement was for access to white-paper that offered detailed information, we can send a postcard that is customized for that behavior. Another simple example would be triggered responses to trade-show sign ups. As you gather names of trade show attendees that stop by your booth, a triggered and customized message is sent just to visitors of your booth.

Triggered marketing can get much more complex and offer several levels of responses that depend upon users’ actions and subsequent actions.