As important as advertising is for getting the word out about your client’s business, when it comes to sharing new messaging with their target audience, there’s no substitute for direct marketing. Other types of marketing have their place in elaborate campaigns, but none have quite the same ability to drive targeted messaging.
In this guide, we’ll be discussing how project management software for marketing agencies can complement your direct marketing efforts and potentially boost your team’s chances of a successful outcome time and time again.
What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing revolves around targeting the specific people who are most likely to buy your client’s products or services. It involves multiple stages, including brainstorming, creating, executing, and sharing campaigns across various channels.
It differs from other approaches by exclusively taking a B2C (business-to-customer) approach instead of a B2B (business-to-business) one. Further, it speaks straight to the customer to bring in new leads and ultimately increase conversions based on the client’s needs.
Not a “mass media” solution, direct marketing eliminates the middleman typically present in more traditional forms of advertising. Campaigns are usually focused on a specific call to action that will evoke a response from the consumer. It’s important to note that conversions don’t always imply active sales, depending on the goals of the client. Be it brochure downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or something similar, the KPIs can vary.
Why Direct Marketing Works
Direct marketing is a beneficial strategy for businesses because of its detailed targeting and clear goals, as well as the fact that campaigns are easy to track and measure relative to other approaches.
The various digital channels involved are typically geared towards generating large volumes of data alongside analytics and insights that present a holistic view of campaign performance. This data can be further organized, analyzed, and interpreted through the use of work management software.
From social media to email and PPC campaigns, direct marketing focuses on a target audience, which offers an opportunity for personalization that can help with improving conversion rates. Total engagement can also indicate what’s working and what isn’t, allowing your team to make quick changes to bring the campaign back on track before it may be too late to salvage it.
How Project Management Software Can Help With Direct Marketing
If direct marketing sounds like a good approach for your next client campaign, you’ll be excited to learn that the right project management software can take these campaigns to the next level. From analyzing data for reporting to increasing efficiency through high levels of organization, here are five ways it can help at all stages of the marketing funnel.
1. Direct marketing is data-driven
According to a recent paper, over half of marketers have seen “a high demand for customer-centric communications”. Team leaders like yourself can get the most out of data points presented at every campaign stage by using project management software that gathers and centralizes all of it. When this happens, it makes it far easier for you to analyze what you’re working with, along with making the reporting process more efficient than if you were tracking things manually.
Scoro’s work management software is designed to bring data from many external sources into a single dashboard that easily allows you to make informed decisions based on real-time data. If your campaign messaging isn’t quite hitting its engagement targets on specific platforms, making changes based on actual data should yield instant results.
Campaign metrics can also make audience segmentation easier: soon, you’ll know everything there is to know about the specific personas who respond best to the messaging shared by your ongoing direct marketing efforts.
2. Direct marketing is cost-effective
In a post-COVID economic landscape, brands and agencies need to manage their budgets more carefully than ever. Because direct messaging cuts out the middleman and speaks directly to the potential customer, even campaigns with tiny budgets have an opportunity to thrive. Total marketing spend will eventually pay for itself on long-term client collaborations, based on the insights about their target audience acquired along the way.
Setting up a marketing budget is no easy feat, and charging a client the wrong fee from a poor calculation can mean losses for your agency despite a successful campaign. Monitoring a budget also takes a fair amount of work, which project management software lets you easily streamline.
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3. Direct marketing is easily reportable
There are a lot of moving parts to any direct marketing campaign, all of which must be carefully tracked to help dictate changes along the way – not to mention the thorough feedback you’ll need to give your client. With the right project management software, pulling specific reports should only take a couple of minutes, especially if you’ve already customized your primary dashboard upfront.
The result is total accountability across all stages of the marketing funnel – a feat that wasn’t possible a few decades ago, when handing out flyers was one of the few ways to get the word out about your client’s products or services. Now, the client will get to see actual ROI based on their campaign spend.
Analytics data that tells you how much it costs for each client to acquire a new customer can also be useful to entice a client to renew their contract, especially if you’ve brought this figure down between the start and the end of a specific campaign.
4. Direct marketing requires organization
An efficient direct marketing campaign should be highly organized from the jump. It’s easy to assume that this only applies to bigger campaigns, but smaller ones also need to be well-oiled to reach their targets.
Often, agencies that run smaller campaigns by trade will need their teams to divide their attention between multiple projects simultaneously. If everything is organized and you, as a team leader, have a way of overseeing progress from a central location, your likelihood of a positive outcome is far greater.
In a world where digital marketing is king, you should forget about organizing campaigns by hand with Word docs or Post-it Notes. Project management software is the best investment for keeping everyone on the same page and help you get a grip on whether your direct marketing campaigns are hitting their mark.
5. Direct marketing can inform other campaigns
One of the best aspects of direct marketing is how it signals new opportunities for future campaigns through its extensive insights. Learnings from one campaign might go as far as feeding into one for an entirely different client, improving your retention all around.
Scoro is great at helping you spot these discoveries when your team is working on several campaigns at once. It automates many of the once manual processes to help you get to the most relevant information, freeing up your time and giving you the chance to solve problems elsewhere. The result is an increased capacity for brainstorming, especially when carving out different ways to upsell your client’s target audience.
Key takeaways
It’s safe to say that direct marketing and project management interconnect in a way that not only provides high-level insights to your agency but also offers clients the peace of mind that your team has a firm grip on all the moving parts of the campaign. Using them in conjunction with each other also gives you a wealth of information to share with clients as you go, rather than bombarding them with a long presentation after the fact.
If end-to-end functionality is what you’re after to take your direct marketing campaigns to a next level, Scoro is the way to go. It minimizes data fragmentation by pulling everything into a single dashboard, regardless of the individual sources feeding into the system. By connecting these data sets and presenting them neatly and in a way that is easy to understand, project leaders can dictate the next steps without spending too much time collating disparate information to plan accordingly. Your team will also have more resources to focus their energy on the creative side of campaigns rather than getting stuck in a wave of admin.
The end result? A greater chance of success, happier clients, and increased potential for renewed contracts and ROI What’s not to love?
To learn more about how Scoro can breathe new life into your direct marketing efforts, you can start a free 14-day trial today.