Speaking Directly — IABC Panel Discussion

On Feb­ru­ary I was given the priv­i­lege of tak­ing part in a panel dis­cus­sion put on by the Day­ton Chap­ter of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Busi­ness Com­mu­ni­ca­tors. The dis­cus­sion revolved around the use of Direct Mar­ket­ing. I was joined by Michael Boyd from BRC Mar­ket­ing and Jay Har­ris of 1 Earth — 2 really bright and insight­ful guys. It was really a great expe­ri­ence. We all seemed to share many of the same views about the chang­ing world of direct marketing.

Michael had a quote that I loved. In talk­ing about the impor­tance of match­ing up the right mes­sage with the tar­get mar­ket he stated, “You only have one chance to be irrel­e­vant.” I thought this was great. Heck, I might argue that you might not even get a chance at all. The idea he was putting forth was right on. Peo­ple are busy. By con­tact­ing them with your mes­sage, you are in essence inter­rupt­ing them and ask­ing them to pay atten­tion to what you have to say. Well, mess that up once and you will likely never get the chance again. Thus, you bet­ter do your homework.

Jay had some great insights about the appro­pri­ate bal­ance between copy and graph­ics — espe­cially as they per­tain to email mar­ket­ing. He also spoke about some of the work that his firm had done in devel­op­ing suc­cess­ful direct response cam­paigns. He shared my belief that too lit­tle time is spent on mar­ket­ing to exist­ing cus­tomers, whom you already have a rela­tion­ship with.

I got to talk a lit­tle about some of my pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ences with direct mail and direct response as well. Even bet­ter, I got to dis­cuss the excit­ing new ini­tia­tives I am work­ing on at LUCRUM like the com­pany blog. I put forth the idea that if you are going to do direct response mar­ket­ing, keep the mes­sage sim­ple, make the cre­ative com­pelling, and get the list right. Oh, and make sure to check the phone num­bers, web addresses, and other key bits of infor­ma­tion before send­ing items to be printed and mailed.

All in all, it was really a great expe­ri­ence. I would like to thank Saman­tha Enslen and Sara McCather­ine at IABC for ask­ing me to par­tic­i­pate. I am hon­ored that you gave me the oppor­tu­nity, and I hope that you and the mem­bers of IABC enjoyed it as much as I did.

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