A lot of marketers needlessly complicate the art of marketing. When you strip away the complicated terminology, feature-packed advertising platforms, and technology, direct response marketing is really just the art of spending money to make money.
The ideal goal, of course, is to spend as little as possible to make as much as you can – a particularly common goal amongst marketers. Despite the simplicity of effective advertising, however, many marketers lose track of what really matters.
Adding endless gimmicks and features to your campaigns won’t produce more leads – at least not in any significant quantities. Changing your copy impress people with a clever pun might raise an eyebrow or two, but is it helping you to make more sales?
Legendary advertising guru David Ogilvy mocked advertisers that tried too hard to be clever or thought provoking. His argument was that advertisements should sell, not win Oscars, and anything unrelated to the mission of increasing sales was worth very little.
In today’s gimmick-heavy, substance lacking marketing world, his words are more valuable than they ever were before. The best way to make more for less is, in effect, to do what your competitors aren’t doing, and do what they are doing even better.
If you’re a search advertiser:
Instead of writing your advertisements based on what you think is right and wrong, take a look at what your competitors are doing. View your top PPC rivals and think about what they’re doing that’s allowing them to bid for high search positions.
It could be a straightforward, powerful headline. It could be a great description that increases clickthrough rates and encourages users to buy. It could even be the URL that they’re using as their display domain, which does often make a difference.
Instead of overcomplicating things, cut to the chase and look at the key tactics that are working in your industry. What are your competitors doing better? What’s the best way to beat them? How and when can you implement your new strategy?
If you’re a display advertiser:
Display advertisers might find it slightly more difficult to enhance a campaign than their search counterparts. This is largely due to the granular nature of most display networks, where pricing and performance is calculated on a per-page, per-domain, and per-keyword basis rather than purely based on search keywords.
Nonetheless, the same type of optimisation is very possible. Using research tools like WhatRunsWhere, you can easily spot trends amongst rival advertisers in your industry. Mixrank, another ad-spotting tool, allows advertisers to browse frequent display advertisements as well as their top-performing domain placements.
Beyond simply optimising your placements to run ads where they’re most profitable for your business, look at the different dimensions of your ads. Sometimes 300×250 display ads perform the best, while other campaigns may benefit from skyscraper or traditional 160×600 banner advertisements.
If you’re a salesperson:
Optimising your phone sales strategy is much like optimising an ad campaign: it’s all about finding the top-performing demographics and building your strategy to better target them.
If you’re involved in business-to-business sales, for example, and your key audience is executives, you can cut out wasted time by tailoring your efforts to better find the leads that will respond to your message.
Search using LinkedIn or a similar social network to find people that are similar to your existing customers. If you work with marketing directors, for example, search for similar people to the type of clients that you’re already dealing with. From here, it’s easy to build a highly targeted target list that can save you large amounts of time.
Generating leads as a salesperson doesn’t have to be all trial and error. Once you can identify the type of client or customer that your business wants, it’s easy to find them and market to them using services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and online job boards.
If you’re a copywriter or email marketer:
Avoid the urge to be smart, sophisticated, and funny, and instead focus on being as effective at selling things as you can be. While we like to think that we’re no longer part of the era of brash sales letters and bold headlines, the reality is that the same strategies that were effective 50 years ago remain equally as effective today.
Plan and write your emails using the tactics that David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, and other mega-successful advertising copywriters used decades ago. Build your ads with sales responses in mind, not funny reactions and raised eyebrows. Don’t be scared of writing ‘salesy’ copy – instead, embrace the potential to sell things.
One of the biggest mistakes of many 21st century marketing campaigns is their total aversion to being seen as commercial or pushy. If you want to make the most from a small advertising or direct marketing budget, it helps to use words and phrases that are designed to sell, not just to impress your readers.
If you run an affiliate program or CPA campaign:
Optimising a CPA-based advertising campaign isn’t about front-end metrics, but the metrics going on once users enter your offer. If you’re buying leads, one of the best ways to make more for less is to isolate your top-performing lead sources and spend more money there, while decreasing the amount you spend on low quality leads.
Another great way is to purchase different types of leads and work out which is the best option for your business. If you purchase short-form leads, for example, just an email address or phone number, you might be able to achieve a greater return from your advertising campaigns than you could buying more expensive long-form leads.
At the end of the day, a lot of marketing is trial and error. By testing new leads, new advertising platforms, and new strategies that your competitors are using, you’ll be able to find a scalable, effective marketing strategy that increases your margin while decreasing your total advertising spend.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5930116778/
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