Direct Marketing:
Direct marketing is a marketing approach that involves presenting or pitching your product or solution to your potential buyer. It’s a more active approach than indirect marketing, that prioritizes information over pitching. It relies on direct communication with the lead, rather than through advertising, and is popular with companies that need speedier results.
The best B2B marketing involves a combination of strategies, including indirect and direct marketing. It’s important to target buyers wherever possible, meaning B2B marketers need to involve a variety of media across a variety of channels.
Direct marketing is just one way that B2B marketers can communicate with their leads. It involves direct outreach to those you’re looking to target. It’s an active approach to creating connections with your leads.
It is particularly common in the DTC space, where buyers are aware of their problem and are more open to a purchase in order to solve it. Typically, they are weighing up different brands, rather than trying to find more information about their problem. The more direct nature of this marketing approach is suited to a buyer that is open to purchase discussions.
That’s not to say that direct marketing isn’t applicable to B2B companies. So, what types of direct marketing should you be implementing? And, what are the benefits?
Direct or Indirect?
As a B2B company, should you be utilizing direct or indirect marketing strategies? The truth is, you should be working on both. The best B2B marketing uses an amalgamation of strategies in order to target their buyers, no matter where they are.
Direct marketing can achieve things that indirect marketing can’t, and vice versa. Direct marketing is great for campaigns that need speedy results, or where feedback is crucial.
Directly reaching out to your audience allows a more open channel of communication. Your audience may not necessarily provide you with the answer you were looking for, but this allows you to adapt and evolve your marketing messages.
The information gathered by your this marketing can be used to improve your indirect marketing, too. The quicker you know what resonates with your buyers, and what doesn’t, the quicker you can generate marketing around those requirements.
Examples of Direct Marketing
As mentioned, this marketing approach is a strategy that reaches out directly to potential buyers and leads. Unlike paid advertising and indirect marketing, there is no middle man. You can be straight to the point, and communicate exactly what you’re looking for from the transaction. Therefore, these examples are methods that allow you to contact any person individually.
Email Marketing
Generally speaking, direct email marketing refers to cold emailing. In this case, that means contacting leads via email to pitch or discuss your product, rather than provide general information or resources. Your leads might provide their information in exchange for information, or you may have gathered leads from online databases.
However, unlike warm email sequences, these emails will be much more direct about their intent.
Messenger Marketing
The goal here is similar to the email marketing above. You pitch or discuss your product or solution. However, the latest technologies have made messenger platforms a lot more accessible than email marketing.
Typically, cold emails are a lot easier to ignore. In fact, email clients often filter cold emails from your leads’ inbox if they are too salesy or spammy. While messenger marketing isn’t such a popular form of direct marketing yet, as the tech begins to grow, it’s likely that more companies will be using these platforms for outreach.
Social Media Messaging
Similarly to messenger marketing, most social media platforms offer some kind of internal messaging. Think of Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, or Twitter DMs. In the B2B space, the most popular or widely recognized of these would be LinkedIn Messages or InMail.
Just as above, the key is to be direct about your goal and discuss your product with targeted potential leads.
Paid Advertising
Paid ads can appear on a variety of platforms, including Google and a variety of social media platforms. The majority of these platforms have an in-house ads monitoring feature.
Facebook and Instagram are now some of the most popular advertising platforms. However, the key is effective ads targeting. Without specific and targeted ads, you risk wasting budget on ads that simply cannot generate conversions.
Benefits of Direct Marketing
Direct marketing sounds a little challenging, so why should you utilize it? The real key is speed. Indirect marketing can take more time to see results. Therefore, direct marketing is great for testing marketing messages, getting feedback, and evolving your solution or your other marketing approaches.
Personalization
Direct marketing can be personalized to the individual, and their individual needs or problems. Generally speaking, people are more receptive to correspondence that is clearly specific to them. In such a fast-evolving digital world, we have all become much savvier about marketing and advertising. You need to stand out and demonstrate that you’re interested in your potential buyers, and personalization demonstrates a concerted effort to resonate with them.
Targeting
There are plenty of ways to hone your targeting with indirect marketing, but ultimately there is nothing you can do about the wrong audience finding your content or engaging with your business.
Direct marketing can be far more targeted, right down to the individual. You know that the people that receive your direct marketing efforts are exactly who you want to talk to, because you picked them.
Metrics
As mentioned, some of the primary benefits of direct marketing is speed and feedback. Marketers know pretty much instantly when a marketing message has fallen flat in someones inbox. This information is invaluable to the formation of future marketing strategies, including inbound and outbound.
Also, if you’re in need of fast growth, then direct marketing is critical. Reaching out to your buyers, and getting an answer quickly, is extremely important to companies that are time-restricted.
At Nituno, we help B2B SaaS companies understand when and where to implement direct marketing strategies. We can work with you to build your strategy, or simply find the right contacts for your outreach. Get in touch with us today to book a strategy meeting.
