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Just what is direct response marketing and why should it matter to your business?

Transcription

What is direct response?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

You know, this is one of those topics that you either are in the know or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, is a great place to start.

So what is direct response?

You may have heard this term used out there it’s a reference to a style of marketing.

So oftentimes you hear it called direct response marketing.

Sometimes it’s been shortened or abbreviated as direct marketing.

What is it?

Why is it different and what is it that it is different?

It’s different than to this day, it’s different than most types of marketing out there.

Although the Internet has definitely weighed it, and made it a whole lot more easier, a whole lot more important, a whole lot more commonplace.

So what is it?

Well, let’s talk about what it isn’t first.

In most cases, your everyday marketing is very much about awareness. And it’s oftentimes referred to as brand awareness, or brand awareness marketing.

And that’s the idea of just getting out there and putting your logo out there and putting your name out there, and hoping to build awareness around your name and logo.

And that works to an extent, especially if you’re dealing with a very small community, you’re dealing with a locality, you’re dealing with something that’s very controllable, then you can kind of get a feel for how aware someone is about your brand and your idea.

But if you’re not giving them reasons to do something specific, then you’re not taking part in what is direct response marketing. direct response marketing is the idea of getting a direct response back from the person that is consuming the marketing.

Whether it be advertising, direct advertising, or whether it be any, any other types of marketing, it’s that the whole goal is to get a response.

And somebody who might be new to business would think well, well, yeah.

Isn’t that what you want?

Don’t you want people to buy things?

Well, yeah, everyone wants something to happen but if the marketing does not direct a person to do anything, that would elicit a response.

And it isn’t really direct response marketing. There’s a lot of amazing material out there about this, you can scour YouTube, you can go and purchase large courses in it.

And you could just pick up books, some of my favorite books that started me in this journey.

I’ve only been involved in the direct response field or understanding it as a professional since 2012, is when I came upon.

One of my first books was Dan Kennedy’s NOBS Guide to Pricing Strategy.

And that blew my mind that there was this distinct difference in the way that certain people thought about marketing and certain other people did it.

And so that took me through the entire series of the no BS Series guides. This is a really good one to start with is a little bit of an older copy an older edition. But this is the no BS guide to direct marketing.

Specifically, it says direct marketing for non-direct marketing businesses.

So if you’re completely unfamiliar with direct marketing, this is a great one to start with. It’s very straightforward, very simple, gives you some very basic rules to to run by and it’s cool, it’s a great, it’s a great place to start is books like this.

You want to get a little bit deeper because nowadays people aren’t as caught up on being very strict one way or the other.

And so you can’t have a whole lot of brand awareness and brand building that goes along with it. And so this was a little bit of a later book, The no BS guide to brand building by direct response.

Okay, so using direct response while also building a brand. Very interesting book.

Early on in my journeys, I was just looking for something that would give me an overall feel for what this is, and what the ideas weren’t before I came across those books. I got this large, phonebook tome.

This is Craig Garber. Craig I don’t believe is is doing any any direct marketing for clients any longer. At least the last I looked, you can still find his he’s got some great stuff out there about music, but this is, How to Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers.

There’s a play off of Gary Halbert’s book, it but this he talks about everything in this.

And I like it, I really do enjoy this book, I think I bought this for 100 bucks, something like that. And I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

Most people wouldn’t spend that type of money on a book, especially from someone they’ve never heard of online. But I took a shot on it and I’m so happy I did.

Thank you Craig for for putting this out so many years ago, I don’t know if you could still find a copy of this large one, he put out some some nicer looking ones than this. But this is I just love this is a great book, nother book, from a completely different perspective.

If you’re one, you get a very broad based idea of how this has affected the larger markets and how you could take this very international.

This is a great one.

I brought this up before, Buy Now! by Rick Zarya and Ron Ledge. With Tom Kelly.

This is all about the direct response of television into things. So when you’re talking infomercials, when you’re talking the infomercials that are both on the long format, that that were popular for quite a while in the 90s and 2000s.

And also the short format, infomercials, and commercials.

This is an entertaining book because it tells very specific stories about how they went about doing these what worked, what didn’t work.

Very interesting that those would give you a taste of direct response, what direct response is about is about getting an initial response and getting to sales as quickly as possible so that you can tie your advertising directly to an end game.

Now, it may not mean that you’re getting them to purchase something right off the bat. But if you can be able to track your ads to an end game, maybe it’s building leads, and those leads eventually lead to sales.

But having that in the process so that you can get better and better and better at your advertising instead of guessing and guessing and guessing and spending more and more money and just going by your gut on whether something feels like it’d be a good idea or not, or whether it feels like something that would be entertaining or not, instead of having kind having science direct you. That’s what direct response is all about.

So hopefully that makes sense. I definitely subscribe to the concepts of direct response. I think it should be the first place that people work in, especially if you’re on a tight budget.

But there’s no reason why the largest brands should not be spending more time building up direct response advertising. It just makes more sense in the long run.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you. If you’d like ideas on how to not just use direct response, but the entire methodology of direct response I talk about all in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Amazon-Proof is not about fighting Amazon directly. It’s about making yourself completely resistant to any form of competition, even if that competition is as large and foreboding as amazon.com.

You can get a free copy of my book at amazon proof book.com AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.