Casting a wide net with your marketing efforts is a great way to spend your entire budget in one fell swoop. There are a few basic rules people tend to forget when they take this approach. The first one is that you should know your audience. The second is that is takes many impressions for someone to really remember you.
Most often the wide net stories go something like this:
“We ran this really expensive direct mail piece to 10,000 people and we didn’t get a single sale from it.”
There are two problems with this scenario. The first is that they didn’t narrow down their audience to a target segment. The second is that a single impression, like a postcard or flyer, rarely gets a response the first time. Only on the fourth or fifth time do the calls start coming in. A smarter scenario would have been to choose a smaller, more targeted portion of your database — say 2,000 — and send them 5 different cards over the period of a few months. You still may not get any calls the first time, but you will start to see a positive turnaround after the third, fourth and fifth tries.
Restating and reinforcing your message to your targeted and potentially interested audience is a tried and true marketing strategy, which, with enough effort and inspiration, will render results. Don’t give up after the first few tries — these aren’t misfires, they are merely getting the ball rolling in the right direction. Think of it like rolling out the red carpet before the big dogs arrive.
