When it comes to generating leads, sporadic efforts mean you’ll be constantly lurching from ‘feast’ to ‘famine’ as sporadic results are produced. Therefore, a crucial aspect of your marketing plan is a system to CONSISTENTLY generate leads.
You need to take a different approach when using direct mail to generate sales leads, than when you plan your online marketing strategy. You want to stop people from doing what they are doing (ploughing through the mail) and look at YOUR direct mail piece. Thus, direct mail marketing is an ‘interruption’ strategy.
First up, remind yourself of marketing rule #1: your target market don’t care about you, about your business, about your product or about your service. In Australia, that translates to: no one gives a fat rat’s clacker about you or the service you offer. When it comes to lead generation (and marketing generally for that matter), you must ALWAYS remember this, as painful as it is.
Don’t misunderstand me. They need to know that you can do the job. That’s why good copywriters build testimonials and benefits into the direct mail and web copy they write. It won’t work without it. Your prospects must be assured that you won’t rip them off. And that they won’t rue the day they ever clapped eyes on you. These issues are important.
All that aside, if you assume you are at a low base line when it comes to the level of interest, you’ll produce a better result.
What they DO care about is themselves, their problems, their objectives and their life in general. So if they are going to give your beautifully designed brochure even a nanosecond’s attention, the copywriting in your direct mail lead generation system had better talk to that. It had better empathise with them. It had better say “I know you. I understand your pain. I see the problem you have. I can help you to get what you want.” Do that my friend, and they will sit up and take notice.
Getting this right is a big subject – certainly more than we can cover in this article. For starters though, these three quick idea will get you heading in the right direction.
1. Use personas for your target market.
Think about the PEOPLE in your market. Better still, think about one PERSON. How old is he? What does she like? What doesn’t she like? What does he fear? What misery is he suffering? What are her dreams? If you fixed things up for him with your product or service, how would he want his life to be?
2. Work out the BIGGEST issue you can solve.
Remember that your job is to solve problems. If you do that, people will pay you. So once you’ve gone through the above process, prioritise things so you identify their GREATEST pain or GREATEST dream. This will be the ‘hot button’ – the area that you focus on with your lead generation system.
3. Figure out your lead benefit.
Make that the star of your lead generation show your strongest benefit. Hammer it. Again again. In a number of different ways. Over a period of time. To find your lead benefit, look with a critical eye at what you have on offer. What’s the biggie? What’s the one stand-out difference that you can make for your target market?
Last thoughts…
Part of being human is that it is VERY easy to forget this ‘marketing basic’. Your product or service is important to you, so you can easily start thinking that people are as interested in it as you are.
This is something you must CONSTANTLY work on let me tell you. Even our professional designers and copywriters here in our Brisbane bunker have to remind ourselves to think the way the punters will when the direct mail piece arrives in their letterbox. That means taking a step back from a client’s brief, casting a CRITICAL eye over things and remembering to take a cold, hard look.
Before you use direct mail for lead generation, be sure you check Jerry Crockford’s helpful article to learn how your target market thinks:Lead Generation – Specific Ideas For Direct Mail
