Direct Response Marketing or Brand Marketing?

Did you put up a website for your business to create awareness?

Hopefully, your website should build a branding for your business in order to produce the desired image and awareness so that it will bring in more business.

If you are a small business, has that work so far?

It does for large companies with massive advertising and promotion budgets.  Companies like Sony Ericsson, Starbucks, SPH, SIA adopt this form of A & P image and brand advertising.

However, if you are a small business, going by that method most certainly did not produce any extra business.  In fact, you may bleed if you go for things like image and brand advertising.

Small businesses do not have deep pockets to keep up with the costs and ROI that large companies can with things like image and brand advertising.

Unfortunately, small businesses tend to follow after large companies in their marketing which is the biggest misconception in small business marketing.

That is why most websites of small businesses focus on image and branding.  They thought that the sophisticated flash animation on their website would impress their target audience and get a response or enquiry from them.

It does not.  Ever wondered why?

But first…

What is Direct Response Marketing?

Here's a definition from Wikipedia.

"Direct Response Marketing is a form of marketing designed to solicit a direct response which is specific and quantifiable. The delivery of the response is direct between the viewer and the advertiser, that is, the customer responds to the marketer directly."

Put simply, it means to set up your marketing avenues (website, emails, brochures, flyers, advertisements) in a manner that convinces your prospect to take a certain action that you specify.

Your marketing message in the various avenues must motivate or give your prospect a compelling reason to sign up for your newsletter, to call you, to visit your website.

The media's expansion of effort — and the resulting ad dollars — beyond their traditional business models is not a short-term fix for currently declining revenues. Instead, it's a long-term strategy that could be required for survival.

Wrong Marketing Strategy

More often than not, small business owners have been wrongly advised by advertising agency or big marketing consultants that image and branding are very important in any advertising.

Hence, the emphasis is placed on building your 'brand' awareness. However, when the image or branding advertisements do not work, the simple reason given is that your brand is not well known yet because there are not enough repeated exposures of your advertisements.

The recipe is simply - spend your way on more brand advertising to success.

Does that sound familiar?

Even when they run for you a brilliant looking advertisement in the newspaper, or trade magazines - are you surprise to get a poor response?

That is precisely what you get.  Any image or brand advertising is crafted to enhance and make your brand look good (…and win advertising awards).

Unfortunately, you do not get any RESPONSE from your targeted audience.

If you think about it, Nike can easily afford to run a 30-second commercial of a sky-diving surfer on TV, without displaying a phone number or website but tells you to "Just Do It"!  That is superb image and brand advertising for you!

But can small businesses just do that?

You can if you match Nike's marketing budget.

Herein lies the problem.  Not many advertising agencies or big consultants know how to create marketing campaigns that obtain measurable responses from the target market of small businesses.

The Importance of Tracking & Measuring To Improve