If you’re new to the world of marketing, it can be easy to be inundated with options. There are so many different ways to reach your customers that it can be dizzying to try and create a marketing strategy. When it comes to figuring out how and when to use different promotional strategies, the first thing you need to consider is whether you’re interested in creating a direct marketing campaign or an indirect marketing campaign. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re new to promotional strategies.
Direct Marketing Strategies
Direct marketing campaigns involve ways that you can market directly to a customer. Many times, these sorts of interactions are based on a specific category of customers which you pre-define as your demographic. For example, you may want to target new homeowners with a “Welcome to the Neighborhood” postcard mailing. Paid print and digital advertising are popular examples of direct marketing tactics. In both of these situations, an ad is appearing to a customer who is directly targeted by your business based on purchase history, behavior, or other demographic information. Email campaigns are another way to engage with your customers directly.
One of the most common direct marketing campaign types is the sales call. In this, an operator calls a customer to sell them on a product or service after they’ve already shown some interest or opted into communications from your company. However, new technologies are being used to send voice drops instead of traditional sales calls. Also known as ringless voicemail, a voice drop allows you to deliver a prerecorded message as a voicemail straight to a customer’s phone. Rather than interrupt their day with a call that they might not answer, a notification appears on their phone when the message hits their voicemail box. Even though texting and other test-based communications are on the rise with the proliferation of smartphone technology, voicemail still has considerable weight. For these reasons, more and more companies are finding success using ringless voicemail technology from companies like Stratics Networks which are much more likely to be listened to and convert to sales. Best of all, you can even schedule a ringless voicemail drop to send at a specific time in the customer’s timezone.
Indirect Marketing Strategies
While a direct marketing approach may make sense for specific products and services, indirect marketing strategies are better suited to institutional or brand marketing. In indirect marketing, you are giving up some level of control over the content or messaging of your marketing. In turn, you may actually build confidence in consumers, since word of mouth and user reviews or testimonials are some of the most common ways that a customer may learn about your company.
Of course, in order to generate word of mouth, you need to get people talking. Other forms of indirect marketing that work for this include product placements on popular television shows or putting blog posts on your website that offer useful information beyond your company’s immediate products. Content marketing like this is often employed in search engine optimization campaigns since the content has a dual purpose in providing customers with helpful information and building brand trust. This simultaneously translates to more domain authority, which can boost your website’s performance in search engine results.
Know When to Mix and Match Strategies
Sometimes, your business may want to use a mixture of the above strategies, utilizing your most dynamic content to attract new customers with opt-in questions on your website. In these situations, you may collect a customer’s contact information before placing them at the top of your sales funnel. At the same time, you may not know much about the customers you’re attracting through these approaches. Thankfully there are plenty of online databases that let you find personal information based on only a few pieces of information. For example, using a service like GoLookUp, you can learn more about a customer by performing a simple search based on the email address that they signed up for your email newsletters with or the phone number they gave you at a trade show. This can give you valuable demographic information like age or geographic location to help further segment your audience. As you can see, mixing and matching the above two marketing strategies can lead to some powerful promotional opportunities.
