What Do Successful Direct Marketers Have in Common with Championship NBA Basketball Teams? – Irv Brechner - Acquirgy

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The great NBA championship teams have a lot in common with our philosophy in terms of the design of acquisition programs for our clients. The basketball champions had two major superstars (Jordan and Pippen, Magic and Kareem, Bird and McHale to name a few) surrounded by a cast of role players -- future stars, rookies and specialists.

In the direct response customer acquisition world, our major superstars are Direct Response TV (DRTV) and Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and our supporting cast includes social media, SEO, online display, DR radio and others.

In the same way that NBA superstars made their teammates better, DRTV and SEM improve the effectiveness of other online and offline tactics. You may have two different superstars, but the principle is the same: put your big bucks where you'll get the most return but keep in mind you've got to develop the role players so that they can contribute both in the short- and long-term.

Our formula for building direct response champions centers around DRTV for a number of reasons:

· Everyone (still) watches TV. 99% of homes have at least one, and 31% have four. We watch 6 hours and 47 minutes a day (Nielsen) and that number is increasing. Nowadays, consumers constantly watch TV with their laptops and iPads in their laps.

· TV is a great story-telling medium. Nothing matches TV for getting across a story in video and audio in a compelling manner.

· TV has an impact on most every other advertising tactic we use. For example, every time we run a DRTV campaign, search volume increases.

A recent Deloitte survey showed something we already know: 86% of Americans say TV has the greatest impact on their buying decisions.

Our second superstar is paid search. It may be the best direct response medium ever invented, and it has an amazingly strong symbiotic relationship with TV. We've hitched our wagon to paid search because:

· It's scalable. You can grow a business using SEM and track results easily. We've discovered that there's so much room to expand for all of our clients.

· The search model – cost per click or CPC – is rapidly expanding outside the search engines. We're testing buying ads on social media sites on a CPC basis.

· Consumers are actually using search as a response channel: they see an infomercial, and instead of calling or going to the URL on the screen, they go to Google and type in the company name, product name or keywords they heard in the commercial. You have to be there.

While DRTV and SEM "float the boat," our "coaches" are actively and prudently testing social media, mobile and other emerging platforms, so that we can complement our two superstars with other proven players that become great teammates. In the same way championship NBA teams need to have the right chemistry, so do the DR tactics that we use on behalf of our clients.

One of our most important observations is that most marketers are not maximizing their spend in, and usage of, proven media tactics. Most companies could spend more on paid search profitably, but they don't. Most companies using DRTV could maximize that tactic but they don't. While we embrace testing new media and platforms, it shouldn't be at the expense of what actually works.

Bottom line: think like a champion by choosing your superstars carefully and surrounding them with the most promising role players. It's a formula that works, both on the court and in the marketing trenches.

To grab a PDF of this post, go to: http://A5G.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 .

Read all Irv's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Customer Acquisition Intel.

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