Build brand awareness through direct response marketing

August 2011

Do you have a branding strategy? Is it working?

A branding strategy can easily turn into a numbers game: how many people you’re in front of; how much money you spend. It can be very difficult to determine what kind of effect your branding efforts have on your target market.

Instead of having just a branding strategy, consider using direct response to communicate and test your brand. Direct response is the ability to buy viewership. For small businesses, this typically involves activities like:

• sending out an e-mail offer
• putting mailers in mailboxes,
• putting an ad in the newspaper
• putting ads on the bus stop seats

In other words, anything where you’re spending dollars to get viewership. You spend money to communicate an offer for the customer to take action on, purchase, sign up, return a form, whatever.

Direct response is an excellent self-funding branding strategy. You get instant feedback about whether your product or service is wanted by the prospect in the way that you described it. Also, because they took an action as a result of your communication, you have a higher probability of converting them to customers, thereby recouping the money you put into the direct response campaign.

Direct response is a great way to do quick market research. A campaign will give answers to questions like these:

• How good is my presentation?
• Am I hitting the right buttons to convert prospects to customers?
• Am I differentiating my company from the competition?

You can use the feedback you get to hone in on how you want to present yourself and your offering, and how to set yourself apart in the marketplace, and increase your chances of success.

Your direct response results will help you make really focused decisions about where and how to advertise or conduct further direct response activities. You may choose to put to put the flyers in mailboxes only in a certain communities, or send your offer to a particular demographic. Your results will help you decide whether you advertise on a certain day or on a certain page of a newspaper.

So using direct response as a key vehicle in your branding strategy will give you the most bang for your marketing buck. The data you gather will tell you what media your target market reads and sees, where they are located, and what messages they respond best to. You will increase brand awareness in the right audiences. And you will generate revenue at the same time!