Direct response advertising encourages the customer to take a specific action when the ad is served. DR advertising is excellent for rapidly generating leads or sales and creating immediate ROI, as opposed to traditional advertising, which is usually more focused on brand awareness and promotion. Contact our team to learn more about how direct response remnant ads can benefit your advertising campaign.
Direct response advertising campaigns are excellent for generating leads, capturing new prospects, and building customer relationships. Direct response ads are also considerably more trackable and measurable than brand awareness advertising.
For example, an e-commerce store may run ads that drives users to a landing page that offers a 10% discount on their first order in exchange for an email address. The customer is happy to do something that will cost them nothing in exchange for a discount. The advertiser is also satisfied because they now have the customer’s email address and can continue to market to them in the future, whether or not they use the coupon.
Direct response ads can also be run on just about any advertising platform or medium. You might choose to use one or multiple of the following to best present your offer:
While you may see some improved brand awareness due to direct response marketing, the end goal is not as much to build brand loyalty and trust with a customer base as it is to drive as many conversions as possible within a fixed period of time. There are several key benefits of direct response marketing.
While not the only performance indicator that matters, one of the most important KPIs that all business owners are concerned with is Return On Investment (ROI). Direct response ads are designed to quickly generate conversions, whether they be leads, sign-ups, or purchases.
Let’s say your overall cost for the campaign was $10,000, and you’re driving the traffic to a landing page offering a $100 product at a 10% discount. At a $20 CPM, you would receive 500,000 impressions.
If we assume a 1% click-through rate and a 2% conversion rate, you will generate just under $12,000 in sales, an ROI of 20%. If the product you promote is sold at $150 instead of $90, that will generate just under $20,000 in sales, an ROI of 100%.
With ads focused on building brand awareness, measuring the exact results can sometimes be challenging. Without a specific action or campaign to measure short-term results against, it’s hard to say whether a customer purchased a product because they saw an ad weeks ago, they were told about the product by a friend, they saw the product in a store but bought online, or some other referral method entirely.
With direct response advertising, you have several metrics available to you that help you understand the overall effectiveness of specific offers, messages, and campaigns. For example, you can compare metrics like conversion rate, click-through rate, return on ad spend, CPM and CPA to get a much deeper understanding of what messaging works best with your customer base and which ads will produce the best ROI when scaled.
Direct Response Advertising can also be an excellent, cost-effective way to build a targeted customer base quickly. This is especially effective when advertising anything with potential for repeat purchases or recurring revenue.
Let’s say your overall cost for the campaign was $5000, and you’re driving the traffic to a lead magnet landing page. A lead magnet landing page was designed to offer a free tutorial, resource, tool, or some other targeted incentive in exchange for an email address.
If this lead magnet ends up producing 1000 leads, you’ve now acquired 1000 new potential customers that you can market additional offers to for the foreseeable future at only $5 per lead. You can now send as many offers as you’d like to those 1000 new prospects via email marketing campaigns.
Direct response ads have various key features that separate them from other common marketing tactics.
Organizations can track specific KPIs and overall campaign success more effectively with direct response advertising. Measuring the success of various advertising efforts gives you a better idea of which actions your consumers are more likely to respond to. Many advanced methodologies are available to better track and analyze even the most intricate variations of a campaign.
One way advertisers can track the origination of a lead is by using the UTM code or Urchin Tracking Module code. By attaching this code to a URL, you can track any number of custom data points about the referral source of each visit to your landing page.
UTM codes prove especially helpful for digital marketing campaigns that drive traffic via multiple sources as they allow you to attribute the campaign and source to each visit. By using this information, advertisers can identify even the most subtle aspects of what is working and what’s not working with their campaigns.
Direct response ads must make a specific offer to the customer to be effective. A direct response ad should not focus on your general brand message, building brand loyalty, or anything else that does not ask the viewer to take a specific action.
Your offer or incentive should entice the specific audience you’re looking to convert to your customers. For example, if you’re selling a product for $299, a $10 discount may not be enough to get someone to immediately respond to an ad and purchase a product, especially if they’re unfamiliar with it.
A specific call to action should also accompany your offer. For example, if you’re attempting to collect email addresses by offering a free report or analysis, your call to action could be “Get Your Free Report Now.” The call to action should be clear, direct, and it should reinforce your offer.
By pairing a specific offer or incentive with a direct call to action, you’re driving the customer to make a decision. This can be even more effective when a fixed time limit is attached to the offer to compel the user to take action.
Conveying your offer in a clear, compelling way is crucial for the success of a direct response advertising campaign. The offer should be enticing, persuasive, or convincing – and it’s even better if it is all three combined.
Whether the copy for your offer is direct, creative, clever, cute, or informative will depend on the product or service in question and the specific audience you’re marketing to. You must understand and include the wants and needs of the audience when crafting the content.
All DR ads should focus on three components:
TV advertisement remains one of the most effective and enduring advertising methods. Whether your customers stream their favorite shows on Hulu or tune in to the nightly news through their cable subscription, many people spend a good amount of time looking at their screens every day. With TV advertising, you can quickly position your offer in front of a vast audience.
TV ads can range from the traditional commercial break slots to a wide variety of ads during content streaming. Many advertisers are choosing to shift more and more of their budgets to connected TV ads due to the growing popularity of content streaming services.
The more traditional form of TV advertisement remains linear TV ads. Linear ads refer to commercials that play in between scheduled programming. For example, infomercials still represent an incredibly effective marketing technique that encourages quick responses from viewers.
Direct response TV ads offer an excellent way to reach a broader audience. Buying an ad slot during popular televised events or shows puts your brand’s information in front of more viewers and potential customers. By combining a compelling call to action with a greater audience, your advertising campaign can produce a more significant ROI and customer retention.
Another traditional form of marketing is radio advertising. Over the last decade, the variety of listening options for consumers has grown dramatically to include streaming audio, podcasts, and digital audio. s Still, the time-tested mediums of terrestrial and satellite radio continue to have a massive reach and are especially useful for direct response advertising.
Typically, when consumers listen to the radio, they are in the car, usually going to or from work. With that in mind, it is important to create a direct response radio advertisement that the consumer can easily remember, whether it be a catchy jingle or a simple call to action. For example, when you hear law firms advertising on the radio, they will typically advertise vanity phone numbers that are easy to remember.
When it comes down to it, publishers never want to let unsold ad inventory go to waste. Whether it be a TV slot, a radio slot, or some other unsold media, they will mark down the cost to run your ads to avoid a loss and host a last-minute sale. Although they come with a significantly smaller price tag, they generally offer the same reach and effectiveness as a typical ad slot.
Direct response remnant ads work the same as a standard advertisement, and these discounted ads are run on all of the top radio stations, streaming services, cable TV channels, and various other platforms. However, advertisers can make their same ad budget produce even more return with a significantly lower overall cost.
Taking advantage of remnant slots is an excellent way to reduce advertising costs without risking viewership. At The Remnant Agency, we help our clients run their direct response campaigns at the lowest costs possible. We work to grab slots with the best viewership volume and branding opportunities allowing your company to stretch its advertising budget significantly.
Contact our team to learn more about how direct response remnant ads can benefit your advertising campaign.
The scale of traditional media is unrivaled across any other marketing channel. Experience that reach, ROI, and scale at a fraction of rate card pricing. We look forward to meeting you.
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