Hasta La Creative!

Direct marketing has a unique effect on people. It causes a kind of fervor in someone viewing your product for the first time, one so strong that the person becomes enthralled and will actually give information or a credit card number to a random website on the Internet just to get something. It almost seems like a far-fetched concept but marketers across the Web are making it work day after day with simple methods and thorough execution.

Creating your own direct marketing firm comes down to whether you have an analytical mindset to crunch numbers.

Copy is Key

The headline is the first point of contact you have with a customer. Before images load on a Web page; before customers can click the “buy” button, they see your copy. So it better be great copywriting. Never write rom a blank slate. Take some time to research your competition and review the ads they are writing to see what works and where their budgets are going.

Your headline should touch upon some of the topics in your copy which should be covered extensively in your landing page. If you are selling weight-loss supplements, your headline should get to the root of the issue: losing weight. “Need Help Losing Weight?” It begs for a “yes” response, provoking users to click deeper into your material. Then your benefits should help sell the product: it’s easy to use, it works quickly, it doesn’t require tons of exercise.  Put them in bullet points, and keep your paragraphs short and punchy.

Outsource Work

If you aren’t a technical person, hire someone who is. You can find a developer to build a landing page for under $200 online. Hiring from websites requires some finesse, so ask for work samples. Always search the candidate’s name so you can see other samples of their work that they may not have shown you. Use Skype to conduct interviews over video with candidates that are not in your state or home town.

Once you have a good candidate, assign them a test task to assess their work habits. What is their turnaround time like? Do you require edits on their work? Be sure to leave reviews of the candidate, providing a fair assessment of their contract work.

Hire Smart People

Rich Gorman, a leading direct marketing guru, frequently talks about hiring people smarter than you. If you’re an “A” student, you’re focused on doing the work it takes to get that “A.” It comes naturally because you’re in your element. For the rest of us, there is learning how to adapt with the resources we have. That usually requires us getting more out of the tools we work with, which is why one good hire is worth five mediocre ones. A bunch of average workers in a room are not going to build great products. You need to delegate important and technical tasks to people qualified to do them. That means putting in time to research your candidates, and paying people what they’re worth.

Take Action

If you spend too long thinking about something, you’ll never be able to execute. Keep a notebook with you where you can jot down ideas that you have. Try to pick one of those ideas and work on it for a day, a week or a month. See how far you can go with something before you convince yourself it won’t work. The smartest entrepreneurs know that success is elusive.

This is a guest post

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