Posted by Brian Berg Google+
Marketing is one of the biggest expenses for successful business owners. Digital marketing has become a cornerstone of every company’s marketing strategy, and when you consider the cost effectiveness, it’s easy to see why.
Business owners using consumer mailing lists in a ZIP code with 5,000 homes can spend anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 every month to reach those residents. Unfortunately, most of that money is spent reaching consumers who are not currently in need of your businesses product or service.
With Google AdWords, Facebook and other digital marketing platforms, business owners can spend their marketing dollars to target people who they know are interested in their product or service. Targeting a single ZIP code with Google or Zillow, you can advertise to most potential consumers for around $500 to $1,000 a month.
So what about direct mail marketing? Should business owners be abandoning a proven marketing strategy that has worked for decades?
No, certainly not. Event-driven marketing and predictive analytics can lower costs and increase effectiveness for direct mail marketing, which makes it a viable option, even in the digital age.
The reasons that direct mail worked in the past still applies today — it’s just that there is a more effective and efficient way to do it with precision. Why spend thousands of dollars to reach 5,000 people when the data shows that, at most, only a few hundred of those people will be in need of your product or service this year?
By taking advantage of predictive marketing, it is possible to pinpoint consumers who have a high probability of purchasing from your business and save thousands on a direct mail campaign.
Individual data points, such as occupation, income, marital status and age, might not tell you much about the probability that someone will make a purchase, but when you combine these data points together to get a sense of the bigger picture, suddenly the ability to predict target consumers becomes increasingly accurate.
In the ever-changing landscape of online marketing, one thing is certain: as data becomes more and more openly available, predictive analytics will become more powerful, commonplace and increasingly accurate. Business owners need to be taking a close look at this new class of targeted marketing to achieve the most cost-effective results. With every consumer mailing list campaign, getting the most out of your marketing spend always makes sense.