If you dream of owning a direct-to-consumer distribution business, you have to market it effectively.
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.
Research Your Target Market
You first have to know who your potential customers are and the types of products that they will buy. Both are marketing decisions.
Because the large warehouse and wholesale distributors already have the business of large volume products that are mass marked, the best approach for a direct-to-consumer distribution is to go after crumbs that fall from their table. In other words, find a product designed specifically for a target market, not presently being well served.
Identifying your target market is just the first phase in your research. Next you have to research the needs, wants, buying power, and expectations of the people in your target market.
Using The Internet To Market Your Direct-To-Consumer Distribution Business
You definitely want to consider the Internet as an option for marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business.
One way to market products over the Internet is to become an affiliate for e-publishers. Their products are mostly digitally delivered so you really don’t have to distribute them. What you do have to do is attract potential customers, pre-sell them and send them to the e-publshers’ sales letters.
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.
That’s the only way that you’ll be able to get enough traffic to sell enough to make a profit. Conversion rates range from 0 to 4 percent, with 4 percent considered excellent. So you can’t expect to make more than 4 sales per 100 visitors to your site.
After doing your market research and setting up your web site, doing individual promotions through the Internet is the least expensive way of marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business.
Using Direct Mail To Market Your Direct-To-Consumer Distribution Business
Direct mail is another relatively inexpensive way to market your direct-to-consumer distribution business. Just follow the steps below:
Focusing on a target market that can be identified by demographics and buying behavior,
Buying a good mailing list of just the people in the target market,
Producing a good direct mail package that will appeal to your target market members, and
Processing and order fulfillment.
Sales can be lost and your business ruined in any of the above steps. Even when you implement each step effectively, sales conversions for direct mail campaigns are only about 1 percent. Thus you have to do the math and know that you can make a profit if you only sell once for every 100 packages that you mail.
You can minimize your expense by using a two-step process. First you send your entire list a postcard with a number to call, a web site age to visit or an address to return the postcard. Then you send an entire direct mail package or in other ways sell to those who respond.
While direct mail marketing costs more than Internet marketing, it costs less than most other ways of marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business.
Conclusion
Two other good marketing tactics for marketing your direct-to-consumer distribution business include selling by telephone and through infomercials.