Direct marketing remains a great way to grow your business and reach out to more customers. If you’re looking for new and interesting ways to make the most of it, here are some ideas to try out.
Make the most of all social media platforms
When your business’s message pops up in someone’s feed or timeline, it’s a type of direct marketing. You’re taking your message directly to them. But there is a difference between a business using social media and a business using it as a genuinely useful direct marketing tool.
Anyone can do the former, but few businesses do the latter. First of all, don’t just stick to Facebook and Twitter. There are other platforms out there that can suit different types of businesses.
Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Snapchat can all be used by businesses. Those that focus mainly on visuals obviously work best for companies with a visually appealing component to them.
Sponsor an event and hand out flyers
Sponsoring an event is always a good way of improving brand awareness. As long as the event being sponsored is relevant to your company in some way, and the audience is right, you should go for it. But you shouldn’t stop there.
When you sponsor an event, why not go a step further and use it as a way of delivering a direct marketing campaign? You can make sure that you have a few representatives from your business at the event ready to hand out flyers and leaflets.
Whenever you attend something like a property auction, you see people handing out estate agent flyers to attendees. This is something that any business in any sector can do.
Send out product samples
Free samples are popular because they’re free. When someone doesn’t even have to pay for something, they’ll be more than happy to give it a try. It’s the perfect way to get people to give your brand a chance because people don’t have to make any kind of financial commitment.
You shouldn’t underestimate how useful this can be to a business. So, give people the option to order a free trial of your product online and then send it to them in the post. Of course, this won’t be possible for all businesses. It depends on what you sell. But it’s something that can be very useful to many of them.
Deliver a proposition when talking to potential customers
When you’re talking to people who you want to turn into customers, this is a direct marketing opportunity. And you need to make the most of it. This kind of chance doesn’t come along all the time, so you should aim to make a direct connection between you and the person you’re talking to.
If you can do this, you can turn the person into a customer. Always start by delivering a proposition. You have to get them hooked and interested straight away. If you don’t, they will lose interest before they’re even aware of what you have to offer them. And that’s not the kind of interaction you want with a potential customer.
