Have you used direct marketing on your digital advertising efforts? Direct marketing focuses on identifying the best prospects for your business and targeting specific individuals instead of an unknown audience. While this type of marketing is traditionally associated with direct mail, it can also be used to target individuals on digital platforms such as social media, display, programmatic radio, and connected TV. Direct marketing has a long history of effectiveness and offers many benefits.
1. No Longer Anonymous
Digital marketing advertising targets an audience of people. You can be very specific in which criteria you use to target those people such as age, income, type of device used, pages they interact with or like, job title, etc. However, the people within that audience will remain anonymous unless they fill out an information form or make a purchase.
If you use direct marketing for your digital advertising campaigns, you can actually target known individuals. This process involves analyzing your current customer data, creating a customer profile, and identifying individual prospects who look just like your best customers.
2. Focus Your Digital Marketing
When you use 1:1 direct marketing in your digital advertising strategy, you can focus your marketing efforts on the people most likely to respond. Instead of taking a random selection from an audience, you can model your data to identify the best prospects. Next, make your selections, upload the list, and strategically target them digitally.
When you target people who are interested in your product or services, you will see an increase in results. You will also see a better ROI on your marketing efforts because your message is getting in front of the right people. Focusing your efforts to a specific list, removes those least likely to respond and cuts down on marketing waste.
3. Know Who Responded
Response data is critical to understanding how a campaign performed and guiding strategic decisions for the next campaign. Digital marketing platforms offer a lot of information about how well your advertising did, but your insights will be about the general audience targeted. If you target individuals, you will gain even more insight into who your responders are, what they like, and how best to reach them.
It’s important to remember that people don’t always respond through the channel they were targeted on. If they see an ad on their Instagram feed, they might Google your website instead of clicking on the link. If you’re not using direct marketing, you will miss the fact that the person was reached through your marketing efforts.
However, if you target a list of individuals instead of an audience, regardless of how they respond, you can match up your responses to the people you targeted. This will give you an accurate look at how well your campaign performed.
4. Better A/B Testing
Using direct marketing for your digital campaigns will take your A/B testing to the next level. Not only will you see which creative is performing better, but you can see exactly who is responding to it. Maybe your A piece resonated more with the older males in your target group while the B piece received high responses from the younger females in your audience.
Advertising on an individual level allows you to collect more data on your target audience and to analyze the different groups within your marketing footprint. You can use these insights to tailor your creative for each group, giving them a personalized experience with your brand.
5. Boost Results with Omnichannel Marketing
Campaigns work best when you use an omnichannel marketing approach where prospects experience a consistent message across multiple advertising channels. An individual on your list could receive a direct mail piece, a display ad, a connected tv ad, and an ad on their social media feed all communicating the same message.
The more they see your brand, the more familiar and trustworthy it becomes. When your channels work to support each other, you will see an increase in effectiveness and ROI.
Direct marketing is all about communicating on a 1:1 level with individuals in your audience. Whether you use traditional or digital marketing channels, this approach gives you an in-depth look at who you are targeting. Direct marketing helps you make the most of your advertising dollars, tailor your creative, and get accurate response data.
If you would like help going direct with your digital marketing, reach out to us.