Best Ways To Market A Direct-To-Consumer Distribution Business
Linda P. Morton
Marketing is your most important job if you own of a direct-to-consumer distribution business.
You can open a direct-to-consumer distribution business relatively inexpensively compared to a warehouse distribution business. You can also operate a direct-to-consumer distribution business easier, but you still have to turn your products around quickly to make a good profit.
In a direct-to-consumer distribution business, you probably will not be warehousing products. so you don't earn a warehousing fee like warehouse distributors do. Your profit is dependent on your product sales. So how well you market can mean success or failure of your business.
Know Your Target Market
Your business research must include identifying your target market and the products that they buy. This research greatly affects your marketing.
If you want to compete successfully in the distribution industry, you have to offer something different than the large distributors. You can't compete toe-to-toe with them. So you have to find a target market that has unmet needs and products that will meet those needs.
After you have identified your target market, you have to learn everything possible about the people in your target market. You need to know what they need and want, what they will buy, and what they expect in return.
Marketing Through The Internet
You definitely want to consider the Internet as an option for marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business.
One Internet option is digital delivery of products. You can become an affiliate for publishers who sell information products and earn from 20 to 60 percent commissions on sales. The publishers do most of the work and carry most of the expenses. You basically just pre-sale their products and send your customers to their sales pages. Your customers can then immediately download their products without you having to do another thing.
Other Internet marketers work with drop shippers. They market and sell real products. The drop shippers are often the manufacturers who fulfill and ship each order. Then they send the marketer a commission check.
Regardless of the type of distribution, the key to success in any Internet business is offering a niche of people the products that they want. Without that focus, your business will be lost in a vast ocean of sites and Internet marketers. So if you choose to market over the Internet, you must define a narrow target market and discover the best appeals for its members.
Without knowing your niche target market really well, you won't know how to attract them to your site. You have to get at least 25 people to your site in order to make one sell, and for many sites, it requires 100 people to make a sell.
Once you have your web site up and have done your market research, Internet marketing is the cheapest way to market your direct-to-consumer distribution business.
Direct Mail
Direct mail is another relatively inexpensive way to market your direct-to-consumer distribution business. Just follow the steps below:
Identify your target market by how they make buying decisions and their factual information (demographics),
Use a reputable list service to get addresses of target market members,
Creating good marketing materials especially for your potential customers, and
Fulfilling and mailing orders.
You have to execute each step effectively, or you'll loose sales. Even with the best execution, you can only expect to sell one out of every 100 people that you mail to. So be certain that you can make a profit converting only one percent of your list.
To cut costs, many direct mail marketers now use postcards as the first phase of a two-phase direct mail campaign. To use this tactic, you narrow down potential customers with the postcard and then send complete packages only to those who reply to the postcard.
There are other methods for marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business, but these are the least expensive. Internet marketing costs less than direct mail.
Summary
More expensive, but effective, ways of marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business are infomercials and telephone sales.
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