The modern era has opened up more outlets for direct marketing than prior generations were likely to imagine. This is obviously an upfront advantage to anyone trying to reach a broad customer base, but it has its own perils as well. The easier it is to access direct marketing, the easier it becomes to ignore it. Consumers are increasingly buried in brand messages, and that makes it ever less likely that any given message is going to stand out from the crowd.

We don’t mean for this to sound discouraging. Quite the contrary, it’s an observation that we believe will help you to better understand the value that can be derived from employing a professional digital marketing firm, especially one that is local to your area or otherwise available for close collaboration on efforts to reach a particular audience of would-be loyal customers.

The fact is that it takes a lot of work and continuous refinement to create direct marketing materials that won’t be consigned to a spam folder or dismissed from a list of notifications with a thoughtless swipe. And perhaps more to the point, it is also a fact that many of your attempts will be dismissed in just that way. Ideally, though, every one of those dismissals will tell your digital marketing partners something about what is more likely to catch the attention of a certain demographic. Meanwhile, the messages you’re sending out might be landing with one demographic and not with another.

This is why it’s so important to recognize the wealth of direct marketing opportunities that are open to you. Because you need to use them all, and you need to use them in different combinations, with different language and visual structure, for different consumers. While some people are more likely to engage with a brand that reaches them by email, others tend to ignore their inboxes but have a hard time looking away from anything that comes across their phones. Your direct marketing campaign needs to try to reach all of them, but once it identifies what works, it also needs to narrow its strategy.

While it may be necessary for direct marketing to attack most consumers from all angles in the first place, you probably know from experience that this can get very annoying, very quickly. Nobody wants to be bombarded with emails and text notifications and in-app notifications and targeted online advertising and direct mailers and cold calls, all from the same source. It can quickly make a consumer feel stifled and manipulated, and lead to them actively disregard the underlying brand message.

On the other hand, once that message has gotten a consumer’s attention once, there’s a good chance they’ll be more open to it in the future if they see it regularly, or exclusively, in the forms of direct marketing that have been shown to work for them personally. Again, it takes a lot of practice and refinement to get to that point, but the results are likely to speak for themselves, and to thoroughly justify your hiring of a web marketing company that is able to focus its attention on getting your brand message exactly where it needs to go, and ultimately not a bit further.