Secrets to Direct Response Marketing and Other Internet Marketing Services

There is no easier way to increase your profits and/or sales volume than with Direct Response Marketing.

Secret 1:
There is no problem in business that marketing can't fix. Notice I did not say "advertising can't fix". The reason is that with proper marketing you can see increased profits and sales without any extra expense (like advertising).

Marketing is the key... and here's why. You may be the most knowledgeable person in the world about your products. You may have the brightest and best trained employees in your industry. You may have more knowledge about your particular industry than anyone else. And the bad news is that 'it doesn't mean a thing'.

That is it doesn't mean a thing if people don't know how knowledgeable you are, how great your employees are and how much you know about the industry. Without a way to get that information out to your customers and prospects, you may as well be living in a well. No one is going to find you.

Oh yeah, and that great website you have won't help either if you don't know how to structure it and position it in the market place so others can conveniently find it.

The success of your company is tied directly to your ability to acquire new customers and keep your existing customers.

That's what marketing is all about. So what about advertising? That comes next...

Secret #2:
Your advertising must be attention getting. It must stop people in their tracks. If you send direct mail pieces then it must be "A" pile mail. There are three different categories of direct mail: "A" - which are things that you must open. "B" - mail that you might open and "C" which is mail that just screams "I'm an advertisement" which means it goes directly into the trash unopened. Your goal is to always send "A" mail.

Regardless of the advertising medium you choose, keep the following in mind.

The most important step is to GET THEIR ATTENTION! If you can't get their attention then it's impossible to go any further in the process. You must get their attention, only then will you have an opportunity to create some interest in what you are saying.

Secret #3:
Less than 50% of business owners use the Yellow Pages today. So any money you are spending based on 'readership' or population means you are probably wasting a lot of money. So your reach may be less than half of what you think it is. If you take a survey of how people find you nowadays, the results may cause you to radically re-think how much money you throw into the Yellow pages every month.

Plus the fact that you can't change your yellow page ad. You can't tweak it for best performance, you can't make it relevant to current events. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not against the yellow pages, I'm just tired so seeing so many businesses use them almost exclusively as their advertising medium. You shouldn't ignore the half of the people that occassionally use the yellow pages, but you shouldn't spend the majority of your advertising dollars trying the reach them either.

The yellow pages are attempting to make some changes by putting advertisers in their "online databases" too. That should tell you something right there!

The old school method of shotgun advertising is changing. If you don't believe me, just take a look at how many newspapers have gone out of business over the last few years, and a lot more are on the brink. Newspapers are the supreme 'shotgun' advertising approach and they are paying the price now.

Couple that to the fact that it's almost impossible to really have an attention getting ad in the yellow pages or the newspaper. Reread Secret #2 if you don't know why this is so important.

Statistics consistently show that advertorials get a much higher readership than plain advertisements. We have all been fooled at one time or another by those advertisements that were disguised to look like news.

The reason so many major advertisers use that method is that it works so much better! Many newspapers and magazines have started placing restrictions on how those types of ads have to look. The publishers are afraid that their poor readers might be duped by them.

Secret #4:
We mentioned shotgun advertising above, now we can get to laser focused advertising. The amount of money companies spend getting their message to the wrong people is staggering.

So what is the wrong group of people? It's those who have no interest in your product or service and who has little likelihood of developing such an interest in the near future.

Which begs the question, who is the right group of people? The best group is almost always your existing customers. This is followed by the group of people who have asked for information but are not customers yet. Typically they will have responded to some sort of free report or information and in order to receive the report/information, they have given you permission to send them information on your products and services.

Secret #5:
You can never know how well your advertising methods are working unless you track and test. It's not as hard as it sounds, especially on the internet with direct response advertising.

It's easy to send out two versions of an email. One with a different headline than the other. Maybe one with a picture link instead of a text link.

Track the performance and establish your baseline. Then you can make a change, track it and see if it performed better, if it did, that becomes your new baseline. Just keep tweaking the performance. It's not unusual to achieve performance levels that are double and triple your original baseline. That translates into a lot more profit with no more expense.

Is this important? Think about this..... To make an example we will have to set up some assumptions (feel free to substitute your own numbers in here as well)

Amount spent on particular advertising medium per month (direct mail, yellow pages, newspapers, radio, tv, door hangers, etc) Yellow pages are excluded because you can't change them except for once per year. For our example we will use $3000.

Let's say you currently get a 2% response and it results in $3500 in profit. So the campaign is profitable by $500.

Now lets say you tested and tweaked and found out that you can get the response up to 4% (not an unrealistic number at all). Now you have doubled your profit to $1000 and your costs have increased exactly ZERO. So a little tweak like this will put another $6000 per year in your pocket. Not bad.

Now multiply this over all forms of advertising and you start to get the picture.

Secret #6:
Your opinion doesn't matter. Neither does your wife's, girlfriends, family or employees opinions. The only vote that counts is that of a paying customer. That's it, that's why you are in business. You and all of your friends may hate your ad but if after testing, it's working then use it.

It's important to keep your ego out of it too. And you will probably think it's time to change the ad at some time because YOU see it every day. Just remember that your customers don't see it every day and as long as they are bringing in their cash to buy your products.... leave it alone.

A good question to ask with every point you make in an ad is "So what does that do for me?". Ask this question from the customers perspective and you will write much more effective ads. Here's an example from a cellphone ad that says the model has a voice dialing. That's it, that's all it says. Now from a customers perspective ask the question "So what does that do for me?". The answer is the voice dialing keeps you and everyone in the vehicle safer because you can dial the phone without taking your eyes off the road. You don't have to look down at the screen and try to dial and drive. It's much easier to simply say a phone number out loud than it is to try to punch the number into the tiny keypad. Hopefully you get the point here. Just by asking the question "What does that do for me?" and then putting the answer in the ad, you increase the ads impact and response rate by a large margin. Customers do not buy features (like voice dialing), they buy the benefits those features give (like increased saftey).

Secret #7:
Without an emotional hook, the customer will not respond. You can appeal to their desire for gain (Lexus is great at selling the gain in prestige you will get when you buy a Lexus) the wish to avoid loss (limited time offer, once these are gone, the price goes back up). Another strong emotional hook is..... curiosity.

If you ask the right question and the customer mentally stops to answer the question then that's an excellent beginning.

To prove the point, I have named this article Marketing Secrets. Why? Because it's human nature to want to know a secret. No one wants anyone else to know something they don't.

That is a small example of using curiosity.

Secret #8:
It's a brave new world out there. In the old days sales training emphasized learning 50 different closing techniques and how to effectively overcome any customer objection.

Let's face it, that just doesn't work in a world where the customer has probably done a lot of research on line before they even come into your store. Actually, in todays world the customer may NEVER even come into your store. They could complete the entire transaction over the internet and never give your highly trained salespeople the chance to use any of their sales skills.

Secret #9:
If you don't know how to market via the internet using websites, blogs and/or direct response advertising then you are doomed to fail. You are NOT insulated even if your industry is currently not being sold via the internet. Think about this, prior to the invention of the automobile, one of the largest industries was the manufacturing of buggy whips. I'm sure a lot of buggy whip company owners said, don't worry about it, it won't affect our business. At some point your competition will figure out a way to sell whatever it is you are selling via the internet. At that point you will be behind the curve and trying to play catch up.

The question to ask yourself is why wait? Shouldn't you be the one putting your competition behind the curve? Of course you should.

Secret #10:
We touched on this earlier. Shotgun advertising is dead. If you continue to spend the majority of your advertising dollars that way, you are edging closer to disaster everyday.

You absolutely must place your advertising where it gets the best results. And to get the best results you must get your ads in front of the people who have an interest in what you want to say. Then you must state your case in such a way that gets the customers attention and peaks their interest, and lastly you must test, test, test, to improve your response rates.

Without a doubt, the best internet marketing service is direct response advertising. It's relatively cheap, it's incredibly targeted and the amount of data available makes tweaking the performance easy to do.

For those unfamiliar with how direct response advertising works, you can sign up for a free trial at TheProfitAdvisor.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ray Smith has successfully run multiple businesses. Early in his career, he started his own successful company. Two of the companies he started were sold to Fortune 100 companies and he was given an executive level management position after the acquisition. This gives him the unique perspective of being able to see problems and opportunities as both an entrepreneur and as a executive in a multi-billion dollar company. He continues to start, build and grow companies today. He has a course designed to address all aspects of Internet Marketing. The Marketing Course is offered at no charge and covers 52 weekly lessons sent via email. He can be contacted via his website at http://TheProfitAdvisor.com.