You're not selling a hosepipe you're selling a lovely garden.
The creation and development of a complete campaign that places you where you want to be in the market is sometimes overlooked in companies because of the daily round of every other activity that running a business demands.
As a result advertising programmes - especially mail shots - can be left until the last minute and then rushed, with each mailshot having no sense of continuity with the mailshot before. Although each mailshot might well continue to make money the overall impact is missing, and additional sales that could be made through a growth in awareness of the company as a whole, never arrive.
Running a campaign involves deciding at the start how you are going to project your product or service, and how you are going to differentiate yourself from others. In direct mail terms it involves for example deciding which of the five main approaches to direct mail you are wanting to adopt, and then staying with that approach throughout most of your campaign. The available approaches are:
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Selling on price
- Selling on benefit
- Selling by raising interesting questions
- Selling through humour
- Selling through emotion
You will also be looking at how your product or service differentiates itself from the opposition, either because it offers something that no one else has, or because you deliberately choose to advertise in a way that no one else uses.
All this requires planning - and this is really the theme of Campaigns. Even the selection of direct mail lists requires testing out so that you don't waste money on lists that are inappropriate, and the most successful companies will always be testing out their creative approaches to ensure that they are getting their message across in a way that works.
Devising a direct mail campaign draws all these projects together and ensures that at each turn the correct information has been gathered and the correct decisions taken, bearing in mind the continuity of the campaign.
As such good campaign management should normally pay for itself - the additional cost of having a campaign manager being more than offset by the additional sales that arise because people recognise the continuity of your theme, and your ability to differentiate yourselves from the competition.
If you would like to discuss how a campaign could be developed for your company or one of its products please do call 01536 399 000 and ask for the Campaign Team.
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