Best and Most Cost Effective Way to Direct Market

CS, I love the beautiful methodogy of this approach. It reminds me of solving a math equation. If you don't mind me asking, is this your primary source for new business? Do you find it challenging to covert this traffic to paying customers, and if not, how have you overcome that resistance? I love hearing specifics from people who do not talk about theory, but real life success. For the record, I am asking because I have not overcome these challenges successfully.

Hi RainMaker,

Actually, driving traffic to several websites, I use a combination of tactics. In regards to PPC, the traffic generated is very specific to what I want to accomplish (ie. collect data, gather market worldviews, test AD copy, etc), and not for casual viewing.

Talking about converting visitors to paying customers is a new thread in itself So in short, before any monetary transactions are made, I would have already tested the copy, tested the Google Adwords Campaign, found the keywords that people are using to search for my product(service), and developed a marketing plan that answers the questions gathered from my previous campaign.

So, if we're talking about converting traffic, I have already used the data to tell me if there was a market in the first place. As a direct marketer, I make sure there is a market that wants the product, and then I develop the product. So, no problems converting traffic

When I think of resistance, specifically to the product, I think "FANTASTIC!" Once I know that my product (service) generates resistance, it tells me that my product is "shooting for the edges." WHICH I WANT.

From there, it's a matter of finding the people (early adopters), who want the product, are enthusiastic about the product, and cater to them. These early adopters are the key to my marketing strategy.

Sorry, more theory this time than tactics.

Originally Posted by cs_obd When I think of resistance, specifically to the product, I think "FANTASTIC!" Once I know that my product (service) generates resistance, it tells me that my product is "shooting for the edges." WHICH I WANT. From there, it's a matter of finding the people (early adopters), who want the product, are enthusiastic about the product, and cater to them. These early adopters are the key to my marketing strategy.

Can you clarify the term "shooting for the edges" for me. I am not familiar with it. How do you acertain the reasons behind the resistance? Are you in communication with these resisters and they are telling you "no" OR are they resisting by simply not converting and fading away?

Are the "early adopters" your most highly targeted market? What I mean by that is are these the creme de la creme of your prospects--the most likely to buy?

The step to an effective direct marketing campaign are:
1. Define your budget what you can afford to spend for every dollar of sales obtained.
2. Research the various media and their effectiveness ain delivering responses for prodcuts or dervices like you own. There are always dream stories about great successes. but if you resech is good, you willbe able to get the model response rate...ahat an average effort will achieve.
3. This is the basic information that you need to select the media or in most cases the media mix.
4. We of course hope to beat the average by as large a margin as possible, but in planning we always need to have relaistic benchmarks.
5. To beat the average, we need to look for media with "big" upside potentials. its like playing with hedge funds in investing. E mail marketing with a microsite or landing page has one of the greatest upside potentials....its low cost and if it virals, WOW.