Maggie Alderson
On the other hand, organizations that make the most money from online advertising do so by employing direct marketing principles in everything they do.
Unlike traditional marketing, direct marketing focuses on getting a return on your advertising investment while also keeping track of how customers respond to each campaign.
Smart Circle marketing has many advantages as traditional advertising (such as brand recognition), it lacks the same benefits (such as instant financial gain) as conventional marketing does compare to direct advertising.
Let’s imagine you promote in publications, and your ads cost you $8,000 each for a full page in BRW, Forbes, and Times. Conventional advertising would use a firm’s advertising budget to place ads in every paper for the goal of “branding,” with no real purpose other than to inform the public about one of their products or, worse, to tell them the company is there at all.
Direct marketing would use the paper’s advertising money, but it would have a clear purpose for doing so, would provide readers with something of value, and explain how they may redeem that value, such as a gift or a coupon, for the reader to use. Different phone numbers would be used to track how many sales were made from each advertisement and the return on investment (ROI) for each ad. It’s possible to see which ads generated revenues and losses using this data and then advertise in the profitable medium while discontinuing advertising in the unprofitable ones.
The same principles apply to online marketing. Traditional marketing strategies are used by most organizations, whereas direct marketing is used by the remaining small percentage (the successful minority).
Regarding online marketing, direct marketing refers to tracking the results of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO), email and banner advertising, and contextual and affiliate marketing campaigns.
Direct marketers benefit from the Internet because of the speed and convenience with which all marketing initiatives can be tracked, profit centers and loss centers identified, and ROI from each marketing outlet continuously improved.
The only way to track offline advertising response was to set up different phone lines and wait for the results, which may take weeks or months. You may see the outcomes of your online marketing efforts in as little as 24 hours, and you can then alter your spending accordingly.
