Convincing Customers Through Direct Marketing

In present day market it is almost impossible to make difference via mass media, most of the time it is even harder to just get heard. Plus now that customers have so many sources or touch points it’s almost impossible for a small/medium business to cover all those touch points (cable with increased number of television channels, internet with billions of sites to choose, traditional media with tons of options so on and so forth) via mass media to get heard, to convince, to give your target market a reason to consider your product/service.

The only way forward for small business to convince your potential customers these days is to utilize direct marketing approach. As this is more personal, more targeted, more likely to create value for the business and its target market. Now everyone would say, hey we are making those calls, those emails, visual and physical contact but it’s not working.

Well that could be true only if it is not done the way it is supposed to be, as according to (Yorgey, 1995) more sales are produced by each dollar spent on direct marketing than on traditional mass media approach.

I am not suggesting that my approach is miraculous and would turn your business into something making huge proceeds day in day out over night. But it would definitely help you in understanding what you need to do to convince your customers through direct marketing approach.

You may also like to read: Promotion mix: Five things to remember

You may also like to read: Strategy for generating product demand through visual media campaign

You may also like to read: A strategy to develop emotional aspect of your product

So let’s get to it!

Convincing Potential Customers

• Competitors Survey & Assessment

You hear, you see that one of your competitors or many of them having increasing market share, customer base, and you think they are just lucky because your product/service is no less than theirs in terms of price, quality, durability rather it is better but still they having sales and you don’t see anybody coming to look into your offerings.

And you are wondering why, when everything you are offering is similar or better than your competitors and you not having your market share increasing, or it is increasing but it’s nothing when compared to your competitors.

Well this is a red flag, you need to do you competitor survey and assessment that is to send those “mystery shoppers” to know how do they convince, what extra do they offer in direct contact, what is it that you don’t offer, why do people prefer them when you are having the same thing to offer so on and so forth.

What works for them, will work for you, their customers aren’t aliens neither yours. Likewise is for your product/service except for brand name etc. So it is essential to understand your competitors to understand your customers.

• Point out the Pros of your product/service & cons of your competitors

You need to know (as marketer) your product/service. The better you know it the better you would be able to present it. The more benefits you would be able to count to your potential customers.

Remember that each benefit/reason to consider your product/service has the potential to convince your target customer. (you might have often heard from your friends “At first I didn’t know it was made in USA and when they told me I bought it” “I wasn’t buying it but when they told me they have more colors in it, I checked in and I bought it in orange” “They were offering special discounts” “It has everything, almost everything I needed” etc). 

The more information you give the more confidence you create in your customer the more assurance he/she gets that it is the best decision to make.

The same goes for counting the cons of your competitors, as each and every reason there has the potential to push customer to jump ship. Remember the rule here “the more reasons/benefits you can count the better it is”.

But know the thing is how would you know which benefit/reason tempts your potential and what are those that are not much impressive or convincing enough and thus leads to time waste, resources wastes of your company and your customer. And you can tackle that by adopting the following measures.

• Customer profiling

This is the last step in the process, what you need to do is to profile your customer in terms of age, income etc along with “the last thing (reason/benefit) that led to the purchase”. That is what you need to collect. As these are the actual reasons/benefits that convinces your customers to go for your product/service.

Now working on profiling, developing a data base you become aware of what exactly they(target market) want, what they would like to prefer, what you need to tell them, what they should know about competitors so on and so forth.

This not only saves time (for your company and your customers) but also help them make better decisions (products/services) which means they are convinced.

lastly you may like to read "what makes a best seller" and making an ever green product.

References

Yorgey, L.A (1995), “Putting your database to work”, Target Marketing, January, pp. 20-21.