Don’t go for ‘brand awareness’ stick with ‘direct response’ marketing

Throwing money at “brand awareness” drives me insane. Whenever I hear marketing people talking to SME’s about brand awareness I feel like throttling them. Its big time advertising agency speak and a sure fire way of emptying your wallet into theirs without any direct, quantifiable income generated for you. Unless you have the deep pockets of the likes of Virgin or Nike, you probably can’t afford to be spending a fortune on building your “brand” at this point in time.

The reality is, you can’t afford to throw money away on just getting your name and logo out there, what’s the point? But for some reason it’s what a lot of small business owners do. ‘Brand’ Advertising is a waste of money.

You should only be involved in ‘Direct Response’ Marketing.

As the name suggests, this is marketing directly to your target audience designed to produce a worthwhile response that you can accurately track and measure.

This means that for every marketing campaign you run, you must give your prospective clients a compelling reason or reasons to respond.

To get the best response you must be offering something they really want or need, but you will need to tell them and remind them just why they want what you have and how much they’ll regret missing out if they don’t take action now!

All the best,

Steve Clarke