There are two aspects to marketing your online business that you MUST be aware of in order to market effectively and give you maximum impact in your business.
If you are not aware of these two aspects or you don’t take advantage of the difference between the two you could be leaving your marketing efforts “short changed”.
The two aspects that I am talking about are…
- Marketing For Response
- Marketing For Exposure
Let’s have quick look at these…
Marketing For Response
When you are marketing for response you are creating some form of content that is designed to give you an immediate response. That’s why it is called direct response marketing because you are looking for your reader or listener to respond immediately.
This could be a PPC ad where the reader will click on a link or a video where the viewer can visit your web address, or it could be a Twitter tweet that is written in such a way to get the reader to “click through” to a web page to buy a product.
Whatever it is that you create; the sole purpose of it is to get that instant response from the recipient. This is important because without that form of marketing you will be leaving a lot of your sales “on the table” for other marketers to take advantage of.
Think of the Guthy Renker “Anthony Robbins” type infomercial. They usually contain lines like “Order within the next 15 minutes” or “Be among the first 50 people to call this number and you will get…” etc. It’s all about getting you to respond… NOW.
Marketing for response is content designed to get you to respond immediately.
The other type of marketing is designed more for creating exposure.
Marketing For Exposure
With this type of marketing you are not creating content or an ad piece to try and get people to respond immediately. You create the content piece purely for exposure.
It’s all about keeping the company name or product at the top of a person’s thinking so that when they decide they do need or want what you are marketing; your name or the product name comes to mind first.
This is often called “Top of mind awareness” and it’s a powerful tool to use in your marketing.
Think of a product commercial on TV. Let’s say for example a shampoo commercial. You will notice there is no “buy now” button at the end of the commercial, or there is no “be among the first 50 to call this number ” etc.
A commercial like that is not designed to get you to respond NOW, it is designed to keep the product at the top of your mind so that when you do need shampoo, you will think of buying that product.
See how that works?
So then let’s have a look at how this affects your business.
You need to keep these two marketing aspects in mind when you create a piece of content and ask yourself… “Is this for direct response or is it for exposure?”
Knowing which one you want to create first before you begin will help you not to “muddy” up your content.
A lot of my marketing I do for exposure, especially what I do on Twitter and Facebook. This blog post that you are reading here is also about “exposure” for me. It is designed to keep my presence out there on the web and to expose my ability, my value and my name to the recipient… you!
If you are following anything I do you will find a lot of my stuff is purely designed to bring value and to create exposure. And that is exactly what you need to be doing with your content.
You need to have both types of marketing working in your business to gain maximum impact from your marketing. You need direct response to get people to respond NOW… click this button, fill in this form, go here and do this. This is all about getting the response immediately.
And you need exposure type marketing so that your followers will come away thinking that you are a person of value that has something to offer others and that you know what you are talking about. You also want to have your name out there as much as possible in any way that you can.
An example that I do of this form of marketing is my Twitter tweets. Have a look at this for…
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Notice there is no link to click, it’s just pure information to keep my name and my profile pic out there in people minds.
This works especially well if your viewers see that you have valuable content to give. When you post valuable content on a consistent basis people will come to remember you as a person of value, which is vitally important to build a healthy business.
Think of this…
If someone is thinking of joining your business opportunity with you, what do you think the first thing they will do is? I can assure you that your prospects will want to check out your content to make sure they aren’t joining forces with someone that doesn’t offer value or that can’t help them.
Creating high quality content that is designed for exposure is going to help you in your business just as much as writing content that is designed to get an immediate response and sell now.
You need to have both in operation in order for you to be marketing effectively and to create maximum impact.
