Step #1 - Define: The first step in any marketing strategy is to define the objective of your Direct Marketing campaign. What do you want to sell? Whom do you want to sell to? Which people are your hot prospects?

What do you want to sell: This may sound like an obvious question, but it may be the most important. When you conduct your marketing campaign it must be focused, you must have a specific goal in mind. That goal can range from getting people to call for more information to signing-up for a free newsletter.

Of course you want to sell your product, but that is sales - not marketing. Marketing is getting people to want to buy your product. This is a distinction that is often ignored by MARKETING companies!

Have you ever wondered why big business don't seem to have trouble generating sales, but everyone else does? There is a single factor in play - marketing. Big companies spend millions of dollars on marketing, unfortunately your probably don't have millions.

For the entrepreneur and small business we have to jump start our marketing and sales machine. Here are several techniques:

The Free Report: In the letter to your prospects you get them interested in the product or service you have to offer. You then give them enough to wet their palate and request that they call or signup for a free report. When they call you have a chance to generate a sale, or continue with your marketing by sending a Free Report.

The Free Report is essentially a marketing vehicle. Where you include all the great Unique Selling Propositions of your business. You can design the free report to generate sales calls or to continue the marketing process with another free report. To see a well designed free report campaign checkout this website http://www.writeabooknow.com/

The Email Signup: The concept of marketing is that if you show your face enough times when your prospects are ready to buy they will. A really cheap way to do this is to have your prospects signup to receive a free report or document. When your customers signup you capture their email address, and then send them a weekly or monthly drip campaign - promoting your product or service.

If you want to see some good ones, and get free marketing advise signup for Dan Kennedy's, Yanik Silver, and Bryan Bauman

The Infomercial: This technique i have seen used by many of my clients with varied success. The concept is to send your prospect an all out, hands down - here is everything you need to know letter. The letter can either be a long letter or accompanied by a "Consumer Report."

This method is designed to deliver in one big shot everything your prospect needs to know to make a decision. Why you are better, what to be aware of, an in depth report on the industry and a promotional marketing piece on what you do and how you are different.

This piece can be extremely successful when used properly. It can also be quite an expensive marketing piece depending on the length of your report. I had one client that sent out a 24 page report. I know of a person that sent out a 20,000 page technical document with a lot of success.

This is often a good mailer to use in the middle of a campaign regardless of your overall strategy. Since this is a bam-wam marketing device.

Who do you want to sell to: This is a question that you should give a lot of thought to, who is your ideal target audience?

For instance our parent company American IT Solutions specializes in data protection. Now everyone can use data protection but their ideal target audiences are: Doctors, Lawyers, and Accountants. 

You may be wondering why such a select audience - the reason is fairly simple each of these people have data that is extremely valuable, are experts in their field, and are generally not computer savvy. What this makes for are prospects that are eager to use their service and who aren't going to question their advice.

Think of the people who can use your service and narrow down your prospects to that narrow range that are ripe for the picking. The people who are hungry for your services, have the money to pay for it, and are abundant enough that you can market effectively to.