Direct Marketing and the Importance of Contact List
A company's plan for selling a product, namely marketing, is an indispensable component of every business. It includes what to name the product, how to advertise it, and how to convince customers to buy it. In short, the goal of marketing is to channel a shopper's choices toward a single, specific product. Today, marketing is an extensive field with numerous strategies, options, and alternatives available for any business entity, including startups. Although many of these different marketing strategies work efficiently in certain contexts, one should bear in mind that mass marketing's broad approach can lead entrepreneurs and advertisers to waste resources trying to gain potential customers who might be interested in their business or need to buy their products or services. Fortunately, there are more target-oriented, one-to-one, specific ways of marketing, which can be more or less gathered under the umbrella of direct marketing. Direct marketing is the promotion of a business, product, or service directly to potential customers, which ensures that promotions will hit their targets rather than miss the mark.
The Basics of Marketing
Business requires two very basic yet crucial activities: selling and buying. There cannot be a business without selling, and selling is impossible without marketing. Marketing is the heart of every business: It prompts buying and causes selling. A business needs to promote its services or products in order to be able to sell them, and an individual needs to be informed about the options available to satisfy their needs and where to find them if they are to buy them. There are numerous methods involved with promoting one's business, products, or services to people who would be interested in what is being sold.
There are general, specific, explicit, and implicit types of marketing. Depending on whether you are selling a perfume or a pen, different marketing techniques will be needed for a good campaign. Marketers can use sex appeal to sell perfumes, for example, but they probably can't use it to sell pens. Affluent people are more likely to buy expensive perfumes, while those who buy pens are more likely to be students. A marketing team must consider such factors when they design a marketing campaign.
A good marketing plan often begins with a survey to determine who is most likely to buy a certain type of product. Factors such as the age, sex, education, and income of future customers are considered. Then, a marketing team designs a plan aimed at a specific sector of the population, the group that they think is most likely to buy the product. Suppose that a company has developed an innovative new product: a powder made from dried fruit. When mixed with warm water, the powder becomes a creamy fruit sauce for babies. Although babies will be the ones to eat the product, it is their parents who will buy it. The company's marketing plan will be aimed at the parents, especially mothers. A survey indicates that most mothers have two top priorities: They want their babies to be healthy, and they want to be good mothers. Marketers can use this information to create a name for the new baby food, such as “Healthy Start." They will also create a marketing slogan, like “Give your baby a Healthy Start." This slogan has both an explicit and an implicit message. It explicitly directs a mother to feed a Healthy Start meal to her baby, and it also implies that this will make her a good mother because she will be giving her baby a healthy start in life.
Some of the most eye-catching and even surprising ways of introducing a business, product, or service are cause marketing, relationship marketing, and undercover marketing. The last of these, undercover marketing, hides the intent of the message to foster curiosity and draw more attention to the business. Cause marketing involves tying business efforts to the success of a nonprofit entity, while relationship marketing focuses on creating solid relationships with customers to encourage repeat business. This creates an emotional bond between the client and the brand, so the client generally ends up preferring that specific brand.
To use relationship marketing strategies, a business should be able to pinpoint a group of customers or potential customers known for their interest in the particular product or service, perhaps through their demographic group or their shopping history, even if all of these people are not yet direct customers of the specific business. This type of marketing works particularly well for big, established companies that already have a solid client database. But for newer enterprises, the lack of such a database makes it difficult for them to engage in relationship marketing to grow their business.
Targeting Your Audience
With the “blind fire," broad-based type of marketing, the business is promoted to the masses. In this type of marketing, the product or service is usually advertised to large groups of people using local or national TV or radio channels or newspapers, without much thought given to targeting a specific audience. Telemarketing and PR marketing are methods used with this type of marketing strategy. Mass marketing can be quite expensive and requires time to reach out to interested individuals and build brand recognition. A startup, which has already made a great investment to build a new business and may be struggling to get on its feet, cannot afford mass marketing. In addition, promoting the business to millions of people does not seem logical when the startup's owner only really needs to let a smaller number of people who might actually be interested in their business know about them and their services. Once this very first step is done, marketing even to ten thousand people will be enough to grow the newly blossoming business.
Moreover, current technologies offer easier and cheaper tools for targeted, direct marketing, such as email, text messages, and online marketing. Business owners can reach their customers or potential customers through these channels and inform existing clients about updates, new products or services, or special offers while luring new, potential clients. Direct marketing in this manner is a very efficient way of reaching more people, gaining more recognition, and thus getting more clients.
When all above facts and factors are taken into consideration, direct marketing stands out as the most plausible and efficient way of promoting a startup business. Thanks to technology, an entrepreneur of a new business can do direct marketing for very affordable prices without affecting the burn rate of their newly established company. Once the target market has been identified, direct marketing can be done by email, postal mail, or phone, which enables business owners to effectively and economically reach consumers.
But there is one problem, which was touched on above: Startups and small businesses must contend with the lack of an available, lengthy customer list. However, there is a solution: Bookyourdata.com. This data provider offers startups and small business owners a new, easy-to-use tool that readily creates lists of contacts in their preferred target audience. The Bookyourdata.com database is updated regularly: Bookyourdata.com works with ISPs and ESPs in order to maintain the most current information. Based in the United States, the company sells startup companies contact information in a variety of downloadable file formats: In other words, the company provides actual data for companies to use for direct marketing. The files can be directly fed into CRM platforms.
Cut to the Chase
Offering a breakthrough tool for small business owners who want and plan to grow their businesses to a new level, Bookyourdata.com has information including the direct email address, contact name, job level, job title, department, company name, postal address, ZIP code, state, country, county, area code, phone number, and fax number of individuals from more than 45 different countries and in almost all industries. The real data supply of Bookyourdata.com enables startup companies to use direct marketing in a more professional way and thus benefit from the process even more.
And while enabling the business owner to reach actual data, Bookyourdata.com's system also prevents startups from being spammers. Data sellers usually only serve their customers by helping them market their businesses using the databases they own, without sharing the data with the companies with whichthey work. With this approach, the startup company does not even know who their message is being sent or to whom their business is being marketed. But Bookyourdata.com is different, actually giving the contact information directly to business owners. This way, a manager can directly use the information in a more secure and qualified way to directly promote their business.
Direct marketing is a very efficient solution for promoting a newly established business and growing it to an advanced level. When a startup company invests in affordable, accurate contacts, it can engage in direct marketing to efficiently reach people who are interested in their industry and what they have to offer. In this respect, Bookyourdata.com's contact list-builder tool simplifies the process for startup companies, since it allows them to buy focused list of those who are mostly likely to become their customers. They need only buy a list, prepare an introduction for the company, and share it with people who would be interested in the business and may actually respond.
According to the facts and statistics of direct marketing published by Cmocouncil.com; “Spending on direct marketing, which uses consumer data lists, continues to grow at a healthy 5 percent clip, accounting for more than $163 billion last year, or half of the total advertising spending in the U.S. Digital channels are a big part of that growth, making up nearly 20 percent of the total.
The fact that worldly famous, giant corporations still spending billions of dollars for marketing and advertising and the above mentioned data prove together another fact;
Marketing is an important part of business, nearly as much as doing the business itself. And companies continue to increase their spending on direct marketing, investing billions in efforts to reach their target audience using consumer data lists, because it gets results. The products offered by Bookyourdata.com to startups and small businesses are a breakthrough solution for growing newly established companies though direct marketing using accurate, affordable contact information.