Not all small business advertising efforts are intended to make a sale immediately. There’s advertising and promotion that’s intended to raise brand image, improve consumer awareness in a given company, product, or service, and marketing materials that hopefully will elicit an instant response or sale.

Direct response marketing may take many forms, from short-form advertising copy (such as print ads, contextual PPC advertising, radio spots, TV commercials and the like) to longer marketing messages like full page, text-heavy ads, advertorials and the Dale Carnegie-style sales letter. All of these techniques are valid, and which one you use to get your message out there mostly depends on what product or service you’re offering, and who you’re target market is; all of which you should already know if you’ve spent maybe ten minutes in marketing. – 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

Direct response advertising campaigns rely on these four factors. – and we’ll briefly cover all four below:

Message: It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is if you can’t effectively communicate its advantages over what the competition is offering – in other words you won’t make 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: Again, it doesn’t matter what your product or service is or how great it may be or even how compelling your message is if you’re trying to sell to the wrong audience. Basically, don’t sell coal to Newcastle You should know who your target market is, if not then you need to clear the board and start over with your business’ marketing research, before beginning any direct response campaign. You’ll never be able to create a working direct response message unless you know who you’re selling to.

Media: Depending on the demographics, and other areas that your marketing research has focused on, greatly come into play when choosing the type of media to use to attract your target audience. Judging which type of media will be more or less effective depends on who your target audience is. Various groups may be more easily persuaded through direct mail or print advertising, while others may prefer online marketing strategies like email or banner ads. Just like getting ready for a speech, you need to know who your audience is going to be in order to create an effective impact with your message and direct response method.

Moment: It’s not just about reaching the right audience with the right message through the right media; you also have to make sure that your message reaches them at the right time. So how can you tell when the right time is? The answer is: when your target market is ready to buy, not when you’re ready to sell to them. You’re a business so you’re always ready to sell, but not everyone, even if they’re a part of your targeted demographics, is ready to buy.

Ensuring that you reach the right people at the right time involves a combination of these four factors: message, market, media, and moment. They’re all important parts of a direct response marketing campaign that typically generates positive results and good returns.

Accomplishing this can be done in multiple ways. 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…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Marketing and Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.