Why Direct Response Marketing?
You know how when someone asks you what you do for a living? In the past, I said “I create direct response marketing for attorneys.” The next question was always, “What’s direct response marketing?”
I always thought it was pretty self explanatory. From the name, one could get that it’s marketing that gets a response directly from whatever that marketing is.
I’ve changed what I say. “I show attorneys how to make more money by generating more and better clients,” is what I respond with these days.
So, why direct response marketing.
Before I get into all of that, let me clarify. There are two kinds of marketing, direct response marketing and intuitional marketing. Direct response is most often low cost (compared to institutional, although not always the case,) marketing that can take on many forms. It’s testing a message for response, then tweaking until the response is as high as it can go. It’s thinking smart, being agile and opportunistic. I like direct response marketing. It’s not always pretty, but it works. Notice my website. It’s not “pretty” like many other sites on the internet. But, my site works. It delivers information to the market I want and helps solve their problems. Do I need bells and whistles? NO! That would get in the way of what I’m trying to do.
Let’s look at institutional marketing. I should be upfront about this, I do not have a very good opinion about institutional advertising, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Institutional advertising would be what I call “glossy” work. It’s clever messages that are set in clever arrangements that rely on (and the “experts” would disagree with me) what’s been called top-of-the-mind awareness.
When I first started in advertising, I worked with a guy who was very much trained in traditional marketing avenues. As the account rep, he would spend thousands of dollars of his CLIENTS money not ever knowing what to expect. Here’s a brief summary of what I saw: The new client would decide to hire the agency. The agency would find out how much the client wanted to spend and then the agency would prepare a program for the client spending all that money, and often more.
The result was usually the same. The agency was fired.
I’ll be very unpopular for holding this opinion, but, institutional marketing, USUALLY does not work. Let me clarify that, most of the time, it won’t do what the client thinks it’s going to do. To prove my point, just pick up a copy of Ad Age, the main trade magazine for the industry. You can flip to the pages where it shows which agency just got which new account. Why are all of these companies getting new agencies all the time? Are there that many personal disagreements? No, not hardly. The companies usually don’t get what they pay for, that’s increased revenues. (And don’t tell me that they’re going after anything other than that…we’d never get finished discussing that subject!)
What I saw while working with traditional agencies was people spending a lot of money on marketing that didn’t bring in a return on their money. That is not fair.
Now, I’ve worked with some agencies that “get it” and utilize many of the direct response philosophies. And to see that work is fun. But most agencies are run by people who’ve never been “in the trenches” so to speak, and had to worry about where the next $2,500 was coming from.
Agencies are not necessarily 100% at fault for the volume of bad advertising you see every day. Look, I don’t want to appear too hard on ad agencies. I have a close family member that owns one. He’s made millions of dollars in the advertising industry. But the bottom line is that institutional marketing doesn’t make sense for most companies. Certainly not for attorneys or law firms.
So, what does make sense?
Direct response makes sense. It’s easy to do yourself, with a little work. It can be very inexpensive. You can try many things in a short amount of time and find out what works. It can be measured. It can bring in thousands of times the investment. It’s having ultimate control of your financial future.
I hear many attorneys tell me how this doesn’t work, or that doesn’t work, and usually after asking a few questions, I find out they’ve been sold a lie by some salesperson or “consultant” who’s gotten off with a chunk of their hard earned money.
Next time you make a marketing decision, look carefully at what it is you are doing. Ask your self if it’s direct response or institutional. You’ll save yourself more than frustration by thinking it through.
