Is direct mail for dinosaurs?

A lot of small businesses jumped ship ten years ago.

Why spend money for printing and mailing, when you can just do ads online, or posts on social media, or get your website to the top of Google?

It was a good argument, and many businesses took advantage and dominated the digital landscape.

Fast forward a decade and the digital landscape is highly cluttered. Lots of competition and lots of different platforms.

In the past, all you needed to do is have a website and you were ahead of the game!

Well, not anymore. Everyone has a website, so you’re no longer on the cutting edge.

These days, if you want to break through the noise and get business online, you need a website AND a strong marketing campaign.

And that is where direct mail enters in.

Abandoned by so many, it has become obscure which means there are few doing it, so there is little competition and less noise.

By going back to this ‘low tech’ form of marketing you’re getting your message out, with much fewer competitors cluttering the inbox with their mailings, allowing more home-owner’s eyeballs to see your flyers. 

An additional factor

When a homeowner is hiring a service business, they want someone they can trust, and someone in their local area.

By giving that homeowner a flyer, it creates a real-life physical connection (non-digital), which somehow makes the business ‘more real’ in the mind of the home owner than a business they see on a screen. This creates a stronger impression than seeing a listing on Google or a post on Facebook.

Next steps

Therefore, if you are in a service business you might want to revisit some direct mail or flyer campaigns and test them out. Who knows, you might be the only provider in your industry doing it, which would put you ‘top of mind’ in your future customer’s minds. Try it out before someone else in your area does.