Responsible business owners know that marketing is a necessary expense. You can’t make money without spending a little, of course, and marketing is an easy enough expense to justify: if you can’t reach your customers and explain your value, then you can’t expect them to turn around and give you their hard-earned cash!

But while marketing has clear value, it’s not always easy for business owners to justify their specific marketing expenses and budgets. Marketing isn’t cheap, and it’s sometimes hard to measure its results. How can a business owner justify spending money on TV advertising without any clear indication that the TV ads are actually reaching the intended audience - much less contributing to the business’ bottom line?

That’s where direct response marketing comes in. Direct response marketing offers business owners a huge advantage over traditional marketing techniques: with direct response marketing, business owners can easily track the reach and power of their advertising, allowing them to allocate their marketing budgets more efficiently.

Direct response marketing includes a wide range of different types of advertising: you can do direct response marketing online, on TV, or over the radio, to name just a few. But direct response marketing campaigns all have one thing in common: they give potential customers the option of directly responding to the ad (hence the name). There’s a phone number to call, perhaps, or a to text. Maybe the potential customer signs up for text message alerts or an email newsletter, or maybe he or she enters a unique discount code at an online checkout. Whatever the case, the response is trackable - which means that the business behind the marketing campaign can see exactly how many people engaged with the ad and, in some cases, how much money those responses generated for the business.

The consequences of this approach will be immediately obvious to savvy business owners: with direct response marketing, there’s no more wondering if advertising is doing you any good. Since the results are trackable, business owners can use them to adjust their marketing strategies and budget. No longer is paying for marketing an act of faith: instead, business owners can push ads that work while scrapping ads that don’t, and can target types of advertising that lead to more engagement while drawing down spending on ad types that don’t generate as much interest or cash.

In other words, direct response marketing gives business owners the tools to make their marketing strategy more efficient and cost-effective. Instead of flying blind, business owners (or the marketing firms that they hire to take care of their marketing for them) enjoy consistent feedback and can constantly re-appraise their marketing strategies to make sure that they’re really spending money where it counts. That’s a big deal to businesses, because while smart business owners are always willing to spend money to make money, they also always want to know that it really matters! With direct response marketing, they’ll never have to worry.