Direct Response Marketing or Image Advertising?

Most small businesses don't know the what to do: Direct Response Marketing or Image Advertising?

Many small businesses tend to go for image advertising because they see the larger companies, with massive advertising budgets, do this. However, this is one of the most biggest marketing misconceptions in small business marketing!

To clear up this misconception, let us first understand...

What is Direct Response Marketing?

"Direct Response Marketing is a form of marketing designed to solicit a direct response which is specific and quantifiable. The delivery of the response is direct between the viewer and the advertiser, that is, the customer responds to the marketer directly."

To put it in lay man terms, your prospect must be convinced by your marketing medium (flyers, brochures, website, emails etc) to perform the action that you specify. You have to design your marketing in such a way that it gives your prospect a good enough reason to call you, to visit your website and sign up for your newsletter.

Wrong Advice from the Wrong People

The misconception to do image advertising, rather than direct response marketing, originate from all the wrong marketing advice, given to you, the small business owner, by your average advertising agency or marketing guru.

They will tell you that you need to invest in building your brand. When the ads they run for you do not work, they tell you that the reason is because you need to repeat your ads enough times to get your brand well known.

But have you ever tried running a brilliant looking ad in the local paper, or yellow pages and yet get a poor response, much to your surprise?

Well that's because while image advertising is designed to make you look good and grow your brand, it does not solicit a RESPONSE from your target audience!

What I mean is, Coke can afford to run a 30-second commercial on your TV, without showing a telephone number you can call or a website you can visit...that's image advertising!

The problem is that most of the marketing gurus or advertising agencies simply do not know how to create marketing campaigns that obtain measurable responses from your target market.

Test, Measure and Improve

Rather than image advertising, what small businesses need is marketing that results in a measurable response from the target market. There is a need for measurable responses because small businesses and self-employed professionals are usually on a shoe-string budget and they need to know the return on investment for their marketing efforts.

By measuring the response rate of your marketing campaign, you can make tweaks to your marketing system to improve the response rate. This process of continuous improvement virtually guarantees long-term marketing success.


If you want to get a response from your marketing, be it getting new clients or closing new sales, then you need to use Direct Response Marketing! You can ATTRACT more clients, make more sales and increase your net profit, when you focus your marketing efforts in the right direction.

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