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Marketing Made Easy
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How to grow your business by implementing the right marketing strategies.
Part 2: Brand Awareness vs Direct Response
Welcome to Part 2 of my “Marketing Made Easy” training series!
So just to recap, in Part 1 of the series, we spoke about Lead and Lag measures pertaining to achieving your goals. The Lead Behaviours you do every day will, over time, through the compound-effect, lead you to achieving your Lag Result.
The idea behind this is that you can therefore plan out and basically calculate what your lead measures need to be, to ensure you achieve your goal, or the 'Lag Result'.
But how do we know what the lead behaviours need to be? That’s what we’ll be discussing in today’s training!
As you might know from the previous video, I have been running my own marketing agency for over 5 years now, having build it up from nothing into a multi 6 figure business with a team of 6 amazing people. Yes, we even made it through the pandemic and came out the other end stronger than ever – thankfully!
We love helping our clients grow their businesses by implementing proven strategies that result in new leads coming in for them, which they then convert into paying clients.
I have a huge passion for small business and want to help you achieve the growth in yours that you want to see, that will provide you with the lifestyle that you want for yourself. It gives me so much pleasure to see people take the training content onboard and implement what we talk about and then get the results. It gives me a real kick and I love it!
So let’s dive right into today’s topic, shall we?
Now that we know about the correlation between Lead Behaviours and Lag Results, we need to establish the lead behaviours we need to action every day, and we’re going to do this with marketing.
So, what exactly is marketing?
In essence, marketing is simply the method by which you communicate the Message about what you sell, finding the best Media to communicate the message through, to your Market, so the people whom your product of service is for.
These are the 3 M’s of Marketing: Message, Market and Media.
Now, there are 2 inherent schools of thought when it comes to creating a marketing campaign:
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The traditional, general 'brand awareness' type of marketing that is all about getting your brand “out there”, and have the brand become well-known. Classic examples of brands that do this are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike etc. Big companies, with big marketing and advertising budgets.
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Then we have 'direct response marketing', which is geared towards eliciting an immediate action from the viewer, encouraging them to take the next step towards making a decision to buy. Examples for direct response marketing is anything that asks you to scan a code, download this ebook, sign up now, etc. These are called Calls To Action and are the key trait of direct response marketing.
So, I once heard of a concept called “the currencies of life”, in which you realise that the three currencies you have at your disposal are time, money and energy. I love this way of looking at things.
Pertaining to the challenges involved in marketing, you could explain it like this:
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If you don’t have energy, what you’re looking to achieve is going to cost you time and money.
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If you’re too busy and don’t have much time, you’ll have to invest energy to get things done faster in the time available, as well as money. And,
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If you don’t have money, you need to put in time and energy, to get to where you want to go.
So back to brand awareness vs direct response: if you have the kinds of budgets that those big brands do, by all means you can spend it on brand awareness campaigns that put your brand in front of your audience. This doesn't guarantee that they will buy from you, though, and it’s very hard to measure outcomes with this type of marketing.
On the other hand, if you put your time and energy into creating direct response campaigns, you’ll be, over time, able to predict quite accurately, how many people will respond to your message. And this, in my opinion, based on over 7 years in marketing and many many years in business development roles, is the most cost-effective way to generate new business.
For example, if you receive an email from someone that just says "FYI – see below"…. You’re probably not going to feel compelled to respond to that, however if you received an email saying "FYI – please read the below and let me know your thoughts." You’d respond, right?! Now that’s a direct response email with a very clear call to action!
So from here on out, we’re going to scrap the idea of ‘brand awareness’, because this develops by itself over time, anyway, but if you think about it, people just knowing your name doesn’t automatically put dollars in the bank.
People responding to your message, however, with whatever step we decide will bring you closer to a sale, most definitely WILL put money in the bank for you!
So, to tie this back into our original Lead and Lag situation, the lead behaviours you need to focus on are direct response activities, with calls to action.
Now, a call to action doesn’t necessarily mean that you constantly yell out “buy now!”, because that will rarely work, especially if the people don’t know you yet. They need to warm up to you, first, and then you ask them to just take that next little step, which brings them closer to buying from you.
Here are some examples of how you can do this:
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Post on social media and ask people to comment with their opinions
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On your website, add buttons that encourage people to send an enquiry
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If you’re sending out a newsletter, ask your readers to book in for a free consultation
On that note, have a think about what you might already be doing that could actually be direct response. What is, right now, already working for you?
Marketing is all about testing different approaches to see what works and if you have a strategy that you know works, the key is to keep doing that!
For example, one of our members, an architect, realised that after every newsletter she sent out, she’d get at least 3-4 enquiries! Being as time-poor as she was, she decided to only put the little time she had for marketing, into that one activity – that one LEAD BEHAVIOUR! – that she had come to realise, works really well for her business.
FYI – she’s joined us in a previous iteration of my online course, when she was at the very beginning of starting up her business… Now, she has 2 employees, is in the process of hiring a third and is going from strength to strength, kicking goals.
Not bad, hey?
I’m not saying that you should only do newsletters, though. Ideally, you’d have a few strategies that you use, because this will help you build your BRAND, yes, the brand! And when people research you online, you’ll show up in more places and this will help you with your credibility.
So now, I can almost here you say, “but what the heck am I meant to write about all the time? I have no idea!”.
Well, fear not! Because that’s what we’re going to be discussing in the next part of the training series!
Yep, I got you, and I’m super excited to take you through this process!
If you’ve been enjoying this training so far and you’ve found it helpful, it would be amazing if you could share it with anyone you know that could also get value out of it. Let’s share the love!
And if you have any questions at all about the content, just send me an email and I’ll be happy to help you out!
You can get in touch with me at doreen@smallbusinessoutloud.com .