What Is Direct Response Advertising?

What Is Direct Response Advertising?

Direct response advertising is a type of marketing designed to get an instant response by encouraging people to take a specific action. The goal is to generate leads quickly. Comparatively, traditional marketing aims to raise brand awareness and promote your brand image in the long term. Direct response advertising requires immediate action.

Furthermore, direct response advertising can take place through many different channels, such as TV, print, radio, email, digital, and social. Each campaign has a specific goal requiring a form of action.

For example, sign up for this newsletter. Share online with your contacts. Register to take part. In exchange, your business will provide an exciting offer to people who take that action. Additionally, it’s an easy marketing tool to keep track of thanks to marketing analytics.

What Makes A Direct Response Advert?

In the first place, to get consumers to respond to your advert, they need to know it’s beneficial to them. For example, you could provide valuable content in their field of interest. Therefore you may have a newsletter packed with interesting information and all the customer needs to do is opt-in to receive it.

Of course, this small action will encourage them to give you their details, including an email, which allows you to build up a customer email base.

Alternatively, maybe your goal is to increase the traffic on your social media business sites. A direct response advert could be to ask potential customers to share one of your posts in exchange for a gift. You could run it as a one-off competition. For example, like and share this post to win a crate of wine. Or a family ticket to the zoo.

Because a direct response is defined as an advert that calls viewers to do something immediately, the offer is a crucial part of the ad. You may not be aiming to sell something right away, however, your ad should encourage the next action.

How Can I Use It?

A key point is that by adding a sense of urgency to an advert, consumers are more likely to act quickly. For example, you can add techniques such as scarcity “while supplies last” or time limits “discount applies until Sunday”. You’ve probably seen this used many times during the Black Friday sales or New Year sales.

Ultimately, it’s essential that you make it easy and the call to action specific. There should be one simple action in a direct response ad. To clarify, don’t fill it with lots of different choices. With direct response ads, the aim is for an immediate response.

To emphasise the point about keeping it simple, try not to ask consumers to do two things at once, such as opting into the newsletter and liking a social media post, this can get confusing. Make sure it is one call to action.

Another key point is to use excellent copy. We all see a lot of advertisements every day. How will yours stand out? Your direct response advert needs a writing hook to grab attention. What interests your potential customers?

5 Techniques That Work

1. Sign up for my newsletter

Be clear and concise. Getting your point across in an easy and simple way is crucial to a customer taking part.

Specifically, you want consumers to read your newsletter, building up your customer contact list. Simply add a button on your social media page or website, with words such as ‘download newsletter’ or ‘sign up for newsletter’. By pressing the button, the consumer is making an immediate response.

Then you will be able to build up a core group of people who are interested in receiving more information from your business.

2. Like and share this post

Setting up a direct response ad for social media is an easy option. It could be as simple as liking and sharing a post. The goal here is to grow awareness of your business. Hence, a direct response is that a consumer has liked your post.

In this case, you need to ensure that your post is relevant, interesting, and adds value in terms of what the customer is looking for. It could lead to a future sale as you have peaked their interest.

3. Enter our competition

A very quick way to grow your social media impact is by giving something away in a competition. It’s worth carefully considering what this is, how does it link to your business? Furthermore, you will still need a clear and concise copy to grab attention in the first place.

4. Click on the website link

Additionally, another way to grow your business is to send traffic to your website. Indeed, once on your website, this may then lead to a sale. However, the catch is getting people to find your website or stay on it for long enough to find something they like.

A simple direct response advert for this is to add a call to action button on your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram profile page. Once a consumer clicks on the button, they are taken instantly to your website.

5. Download this content

Do you have content that people are interested in? On balance, can you add value to a consumer by offering something new? Is there a new product in your industry? Has new research been released? Is there a poll that would interest people? Generally speaking, by adding content to your website, blog, or social media, you can offer something of interest to your target audience. Their response is to download the content and consume it.

To Conclude: What is Direct Response Advertising?

In summary, direct response advertising allows you to gain valuable insight for your business by offering your customers something in return.

This may not be a final purchase to start with. On the positive side, you are offering something of value that your customers are interested in.

Direct response advertising works best with clear, concise words and one single response. If you are promoting a newsletter, look at words including ‘download’ and ‘subscribe’. If you are using an e-commerce website, think about command words such as ‘buy’, ‘shop’, and ‘order’.

Using the right words can lead to more responses

Finally, once they have responded to your call to action, the next step is to build on this information.

With this in mind, you can use tools such as analytics to see how useful the advert has been to your business. After all, has the direct response ad achieved your goal? If it works really well, you may want to use a similar campaign in the future.

At Lead Genera, we focus on growth and conversions. We produce impressive results and highly convertible leads, allowing you to get on with running your business where it matters most.

For more marketing tips and advice about your lead generation, visit our Knowledge Hub. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you grow your business.