A Slew of Marketing Stats Reveal Opportunities and Pitfalls for Direct Response Marketers – Irv Brechner

Today I came across Hubspot's "100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts and Graphs," and after reading it and circling all the ones that I feel are relevant to DR advertisers, I put everything aside to write this column. That's how important I felt it is to opine on the current state of DR in the digital age. In doing some top-level exploring, I've found that there are an incredible number of opportunities for customer acquisition that combine proven tactics with a wide range of online opportunities.

#1: More than half of all U.S. residents (about 311 million of us) are online and more than 75% of adults are online (Blogher, Pew, U.S. Census).

Analysis: While many DR advertisers have fully embraced online and have crafted a truly top-notch plan, most have not. Until you actually experience the power of online to increase sales, decrease costs, enhance the consumer's experience and drop more dollars to the bottom line, you are missing out on the greatest period in DR history. And this applies to ecommerce transactions and lead generation.

#2: One third of U.S. consumers spend more than three hours online every day (Media Audit).

Analysis: Do you know what your customers and prospects are doing online? Have you thought about where they go and what they do after they've seen your ads, wherever they appear? Do you know if they read online reviews about your product or service? How do they make buying decisions in this day and age where information and price comparisons abound? If you know the answers to these questions, wonderful. If not, you need to.

#3: 57% of Internet users search the web every day. 46% of searches are for products and services (Marketshare Hitslink, SRI).

Analysis: while platforms like Facebook, Twitter and others are all the rage and worth testing, paid search (SEM) is the powerhouse workhorse that we know complements offline and online marketing tactics. It's proven, trackable, economically viable – and despite this, there's so much evidence of marketers not using SEM at all, others dramatically under-spending and others not taking advantage of advanced SEM opportunities. When was the last time you spent time on a serious paid search audit? For more on this, see "SEM Survey Highlights 6 Opportunities for Marketers".

#4: 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results (Marketshare Hitslink).

Knowing this, what is your strategy to get consumers to click on your paid search ad or organic search link? Whether you're doing search in-house or outsourcing, how do you accomplish one of the most difficult copywriting tasks of all: ENcouraging consumers to click on your ad vs. your competitors while simultaneously DIScouraging all but the most qualified consumers to click? We've found that copy is the single most important aspect of paid search success. Is your search copy getting the job done?

#5: Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors. B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads; B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads (Hubspot).

Analysis: Do you blog at all? If you do, is it a "stepchild" or a well-planned program that has the support of top management? Further, Jupiter indicates that blog articles influence purchases in many ways, including helping consumers decide on a specific product, refine choices, discover products and services and get answers to questions, to name a few. What's your blog strategy?

#6: More than 1/3 of marketers say that Facebook is "critical" or "important." Both B2C and B2B companies are actually acquiring customers via Facebook. The average Facebook user spends more than 11 hours/month on the site (Hubspot, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Facebook).

Analysis: Are you taking Facebook and other social sites seriously? How are you integrating these sites into your marketing mix and who is running the show? With this kind of success experienced by the marketing community, now is the time to make sure that your social strategy, particularly Facebook, is robust and works well with your other marketing tactics.

#7: The majority of Twitter users are 18-29 years old. U.S. Twitter users are more educated and have higher incomes than the general population. They tend to be early adopters and more than half of them follow companies, brands and products on social networks (Pew, Edison Research).

Analysis: if your product or service is aimed at any of the audiences listed here, are you tweeting for maximum impact? Are potential customers being drawn to your competitors' sites because they're tweeting and you're not? Clearly, Twitter isn't for everyone, but since Twitter plays an important role in purchasing decisions (Edison Research) you owe it to yourself to see if your target audience are Twitter users, and if they are, formulate a robust tweeting program.

Conclusion

I've deliberately raised a lot of questions that you need to be answering…sooner than later. Quite possibly the most important takeaway from this article is the importance of doing an audit on your entire offline and online marketing program. Such an audit will help you determine what tactics you should be using as time marches on. In our experience, finding where your potential customers are hanging out and how best to reach them is a critical necessity of marketing success here in 2011 and beyond.

Grab a PDF of this article at: http://A56.acquirgy.net

Irv Brechner has written over 100 published direct marketing articles and 13 books on a variety of topics. He's been a pioneer in online customer acquisition since 1996 and offline for his 35-year career. He has developed Acquirgy.com's "Customer Acquisition Intel Center" (acquirgy.com/intel ) he evangelizes best-of-breed tactics to help companies acquire customers in the digital age. He can be reached at: irv@acquirgy.com .

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