How To Get Your Marketing Piece Read

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Designing your marketing collateral is one thing, getting it read by the recipient is another. After all, if you can’t get your marketing piece read, you have a slim chance of generating a sale or lead. It is said that you have a bout 3 seconds or less to capture the attention of your target audience in direct mail. If your direct mail piece fails to “grab” the reader, then your efforts (and money) are wasted.

Below are four marketing tools that when combined in any marketing communications piece will increase your chance of response success. And we know what this means, more sales and lead generation. Just remember the acronym “AIDE” as in “response AIDE“.

Attention – Grab your target audiences/customers attention. It’s easier said than done, however, it’s critical. As consumers are bombarded with the constant “noise” of advertising and marketing material on a minute by minute basis each and every day, your marketing collateral must dominate the competition. A few ways you can grab attention:

1. Using an effective design style such as the use of color, type faces, imagery.
2. Your headline.
3. Key words/phrases in your headline, such as, “FREE”, and “How To…”
4. Color. Red is an instant attention getter. Yellow is also a good color, but signifies caution.
5. If you’re doing a podcast, you may want to consider a dynamic intro that’s upbeat and energetic to grab attention. You can find royalty free production music by typing in the key words, ‘Royalty Free Production Music”.
6. Again, for audio, you may want to pose a question that intrigues your listeners.

It would be wise to test several message and design styles on your target audience. By doing so, you can fine tune your message. If you’re not achieving a desired (realistic) result, then alter your message and try again. Eventually you will find what works and stick with it!

Interest – Once you “grabbed” your target audiences attention, then you need to keep them interested. Some suggestions are:

1. Using a headline that leads them into the copy. Usually by posing a question or providing some sort of statistics that gets your reader to read the copy.
2. Utilizing an interesting graphic design, or image.
3. A visual puzzle or game.
4. With audio or video, you can, again, use a posing question or some hard statistics to lead them into your broadcast.

Desire – Create a desire amongst your target audience. Compel them to buy your product or services or to complete your lead form. Your copy should lure them into this task. You can create desire by making it a limited time offer or giving away a free sample or service.

And the final tool for generating a response is:

Encourage Action – Get your target audience to take action.You do this by telling them to act now or by calling a phone number or visiting your website. Have you ever watched those commercials that tell you to act now. “Pick up the phone, dial (some toll free number) and use your credit card to order, operators are standing by”. These commercials where very effective in that they gave the audience the action steps to follow in order to place the order. Your printed marketing collateral should do the same. Lead your target audience down a path to where they can take action and fulfill your response wish.

When providing response information, I always recommend at minimum three (3) response avenues; telephone, snail mail address, and web address. Additional response avenues can include: fax, email, skype, IM, and cell number.

Getting your target audience to respond has always been a challenge. Creating compelling marketing communication materials that follow the steps above will improve your chances of response success. Some final notes on improving your success are, test your message and marketing material as well as keep all of your marketing collateral consistent in appearance. If you are persistent, your efforts will pay off.