What is direct marketing?
Direct marketing, aka direct response marketing, is a form of marketing that relies on direct communication or distribution to individual consumers and serves to eliminate the mass advertising media party. Direct marketers deploy a marketing strategy with a goal to obtain an immediate response from the consumer to quickly generate a new sale or lead. Direct response is much different than other marketing strategies with more long-term goals such as branding.
Due to the nature of direct response, it is much easier to track metrics such as Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Return On Investment (ROI, etc. Direct marketing almost always relies on a Call To Action (CTA). This CTA is where all of the direct response efforts eventually end up and the result is either a conversion, partial conversion or nothing.
The advantages and disadvantages of direct response
Direct marketers will deem their efforts a success when a successful call to action has been achieved and will assign a value for this completion. This completion is known as Cost Per Action (CPA).
Direct marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing tactics used today. Some of the benefits include:
- More affordable for advertisers with smaller budgets who can't afford television, radio or internet advertising campaigns
- Social media has become a very effective outlet to market to consumers
- Metrics are much easier to measure with the use of tracking platforms and analytics tools
One of the main disadvantages of social media is often times advertisers may end up working with third parties whose interests are not equally aligned. More clearly, advertisers may pay a commission for each successful lead with the hopes of converting that lead later on. If the publisher was only after the commission, they may not be sending the best quality leads to the advertiser creating a win-lose situation. This is why it is so important to work with the right direct marketing partners. Some of the worlds largest companies such as Amazon and Walmart rely heavily on direct marketing for their success.
BlueSky has been around for over a decade and ethics is one of our core beliefs. We believe in building long-standing business relationships with our clients. The best compliment we can receive is a referral. We understand you work hard to get to where you are and our team would like to help you succeed in accomplishing your goals in direct marketing.
If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you, please review some of the works we have completed for other direct marketers in our portfolio.
