Direct Marketing Helps to Optimise Savings Offers within a World of Debt Culture

In these testing times, it can be difficult for marketers to put the finance into a targeted advertising campaign but direct marketing has been proven to actually save money and increase conversions by targeting the relevant people with money saving deals.

Carpet bombing the web with generic banner ads and hoping for the best, may be a tempting tactic to opt for if a business is pushed for time and finances.  However, advertisers choosing to utilise the internet’s direct marketing potential are benefitting from what is a surprisingly easy campaign to set up.

Any business that has a customer database or even a subscription requirement on their site already has a wealth of demographic data at their fingertips.   Choosing to use it is simply the next step into direct marketing.

Websites offering money saving deals are reaping the benefits of this marketing strategy because of the niche angle that comes with it.  The customer analysis they’ve gained from their collated data of previous sales gives them a heads-up on customer spending habits, interests and approximate budgets.

With those factors in mind, they can direct specific offers towards customers who are more likely to respond to such deals.  More impressively, they could use the data to target customers who can afford these types of offers – eliminating the amount of wasted ad space on the screens of uninterested customers, who typically don’t spend their money in that advertised area.

There’s a fine line between prejudging customers and using their demographic profile to offer them certain deals or not.  When used correctly, marketers can divide their audience into segments and select which service/product they have available should be advertised to which target group.

Conversion rates on targeted ads are much higher because of this and although it may seem unfair to ‘group’ people into categories, the offers from a business are still available to everybody and are often advertised more generically through other mediums (TV, Radio, etc).

By assigning ads to each demographic group, direct marketers are personalising the user’s internet experience and can even influence the ads on the side of their Facebook page.

The concept behind Facebook advertising is pretty much the same as all other forms of direct marketing, except the process is operated entirely within the Facebook world of tagging, likes and groups.

For example, if a Facebook account holder ‘likes’ a group titled ‘Yes! The football season is back’, digital TV services like SKY could advertise their sports channel packages in the right sidebar of that user’s News Feed page.  Similarly, leisure centres could advertise to that presumed ‘sporty’ user too.

It’s a remarkable method of building a customer analysis and by actively using these social networking sites, businesses also have the opportunity to interact with thousands of customers via live forum feeds, which could be seen as an even more direct approach to direct marketing.

The operation requires a little bit of human input but considering the data is probably already available to businesses because of the demographic data they have previously collected, half the battle is over before the campaign has even begun.

In a world of debt, recession and possible depression – direct marketing exclusively alerts people to money saving deals who appreciate them most.  At the same time, the technique has the potential to eradicate the annoying online adverts that have no relevancy to user’s individual interests.  Not to mention the spamming generation pending doom because of this smarter advertising method.

The internet is set to be a happier and more sophisticated place because of direct marketing and is such a gift to marketers in need of more accurate email lists to distribute their electronic ads.

The social networking side of the approach is an added bonus too and a wasted gem by web-ignorant companies.  In today’s world, deal making businesses need an online presence and direct marketing can deliver that, with little cost and minimum groundwork.

Tags: demographic, Facebook advertising, Business Finance, social networking, business, web-ignorant, targeted advertising, direct marketing potential