General Advertising vs. Direct Marketing

The experiences accumulated over my last 40 years in advertising have given me a bird’s eye view of the contrasts between direct and general advertising. These contrasts continue to assert themselves in the digital world where direct marketing plays such a pivotal role. 

It is important to remember that the goal of all advertising is to deliver incremental sales and profits to warrant the marketing investment. There are numerous strategies for customer acquisition and retention. These strategies must be evaluated based on their revenue yields.

Two of the most used strategies regardless of channel, are direct marketing and positioning advertising. For maximum impact and long-term success, both strategies support each other. Neither is above or below the line. Positioning or awareness advertising support direct response and direct marketing sometimes acts as the lead strategy with strong support from awareness advertising.

In short, developing a strong product position with general advertising, generating leads with direct marketing, and stimulating engagement with social media are strategies designed to achieve a quantitative sales goal. 

Sales attribution becomes more complex as channels and strategies are mixed to form single campaigns.

With the increasing use of mixed strategies and channel diversity, it has become increasingly difficult to allocate accurate attribution to what each strategy yields. And attributing revenue results for s single channel increases this complexity to another level.

The ongoing battle between direct marketing and general advertising reflects a misunderstanding of the mission. In some cases, it reveals the comfort level on the planning team that must come up with single channels and single strategies.

Marketers experienced with traditional media tend to rely upon what they know to build sales. And marketers who have worked primarily with digital media don’t know how to use direct marketing to build more successful campaigns.

Direct marketers, who evaluate their campaigns based on actual responses have always had the advantage when it comes to sales attribution. Direct response Google ads, direct mail, email, and direct marketing broadcast are easily tracked.

Positioning advertising, on the other hand must rely on focus groups and primary research to get the target market’s perception of success. If increased sales and market share do not improve within a reasonable time period, then the clients must endure the song and dance performed by their agencies to stay the course.

Social media and non-direct marketing digital campaigns compile an unbelievable amount of data. But they rarely show up as increased sales that are directly attributable to these strategies.

Another way to look at it is that professionally designed direct marketing campaigns are tracked by channel and routinely tested to increase sales results. General advertising, however, is evaluated based on sales proxies such as unaided awareness and demand creation.

General advertising is a worthwhile strategies not discussed in this post. These include content advertising and public relations. 

Every strategy should be considered and designed for sales attribution as much as possible. Otherwise, corporate leaders will not approve the needed staff, training and media budgets for campaign expansion.  

This chart looks at the whole of advertising and how each strategy uses various channels for implementation.

Primary Strategy               Broadcast Print    Email   Direct Mail     Internet Content  

General Advertising            X                 X

Direct Marketing                X                 X        X        X                 X       

Social Media                                                X                           X                                                                                                                   

This simplified chart shows the traditional strategy applications as they relate to channels. Notice that direct marketing uses all available channels to generate response.

Let’s look at some other differences between direct marketing and general advertising.

Direct response or direct marketing must reinforce the product position and change immediate response behavior. This impacts several aspects of the creative strategies.

The Creative differences between direct marketing and general advertising.

Creative Elements             Direct Marketing               General Advertising

A call to action                   Yes                                 No

An offer                           Yes                                 No

Short copy                        No                                  Yes

Focus on how to respond      Yes                                 No

Answers all sales objections             Yes                                 No

 Another major aspect is the importance of testing in direct marketing.

Response rates are highly trackable in direct response, so it is easy to set up A/B split tests to know what offers, calls to actions, and channels are most effective through testing. General advertisers cannot know with precision what channel mix or creative execution works best except through primary research that may or may not be accurate regardless of the research method and quality.

One last difference between direct marketing and all other strategies is the critical creation and application of the relational database.

As part of response tracking, every response, inquiry and piece of direct marketing advertising directed to customers and prospects is tracked on a computer database. This transactional database maintains a history of all contacts and transactions made by the advertiser to each person in order to evaluate test and campaign effectiveness.

This same database is used to target most likely customer prospects for ongoing campaigns. The technology for targeting customers and prospects based on past history continues to grow in sophistication. This single process has increased direct mail effectiveness and magnified the pulling power of direct mail in spite of postal rate and paper cost increases.

Here are the key takeaways from this post.

1. All advertising strategies have a single purpose — increasing sales.

2. General advertising uses predicates (or proxies) in place of actual sales to determine the messaging and future successful sales outcomes.     

3. Direct marketers use actual sales and scientific testing to determine present and future success.    

4. Successful campaigns must take all strategies into account for the best results.     

5. In direct marketing, sales attribution is determined through the skillful use of a relational database.