Direct response marketing is a set of techniques, copywriting methods, and advertising strategies designed to elicit an immediate response from your target audience, like subscribing to a service or completing a purchase. Examples include email newsletters, TV infomercials, sales letters, newspaper adverts, conversion-centered landing pages, and social media ads.
Here’s a classic example of direct-response marketing:
Branding or brand marketing is the process of building, cultivating, and perpetuating a positive company image through long-term campaigns, messages, themes, and culture. It often appears in the form of video and radio jingles, TV spots, social media campaigns, unique slogans, recognizable logos, disruptive commercials, and emotional appeals.
This is a textbook example of a branding campaign in action:
The Key Differences Between Direct Response and Branding
In the immortal words of digital marketing thought leader Jason Falls:
- “Direct response marketing helps people buy,” while
- “Branding helps people choose.”
More specifically, there are several key factors that differentiate these two marketing paradigms.
Keep note of them below.
Objectives
Direct response marketing seeks immediate, short-term results, such as signups for a service, generating leads for an upcoming ebook, or item sales. All of these actions are traceable metrics that can be attributed back to the original campaign.
Branding is more oriented toward building long-term business relationships, nurturing brand equity, and converting neutral shoppers into loyal brand ambassadors. Brand equity could also be thought of as the influence and recognition a brand name commands among its broader customer base, both with people familiar with the brand and those who are encountering it for the first time.
Content style
Direct response marketing offers a copy that speaks to its target audience, provides specific promotions like coupons or discounts, and urges them to convert via its carefully placed call-to-action (CTA) cards. It typically does this by developing a unique headline, unearthing a problem, exaggerating that problem to a point where it becomes unbearable for the reader, and offering a solution. This is also known as the PAS (Problem-Agitation-Solution) framework, and it’s very effective at getting people to act quickly.
On the other hand, branding is more focused on abstract storytelling, emotional appeals, and emphasizing the brand’s personality. Marketers achieve this by creating unique characters associated with the brand and using them to tell a bigger, overarching story that falls in line with the brand’s main message. Prominent examples include Coca-Cola’s polar bears, Geico’s Gecko, and Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger.
Channels
Direct response campaigns can be executed through various online and offline channels, typically costing far less than their more-traditional counterparts. These include direct mail, social media, organic and paid search, landing pages, and email marketing.
Branding campaigns are more expensive, more complex, and take longer to prepare than direct response implementations. You can come across popular branding campaigns on various TV and radio channels, billboards, word-of-mouth marketing, magazines, traditional media, and print advertising.
Lately, both direct response and branding marketing channels have been known to overlap, resulting in a rich cross-pollination between traditional and digital media.
KPIs
The outcome of a direct response marketing campaign is tied to several key performance indicators (KPIs), including email open rates, response rates, conversion rates, return on investment (ROI), and customer acquisition costs. For web-specific campaigns, marketers can trace, filter, and A/B test these KPIs in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). KPIs for email-based campaigns, such as your typical cold email outreach campaign, are featured in your dashboard’s preferred engagement platforms like Mailshake, Buzzstream, or Pitchbox.
The success of a branding campaign can be difficult to measure. It often features more indirect KPIs such as brand awareness, brand sentiment, and how new customers perceive the brand’s message while engaging with its products or services.
Targeting
Direct response marketing does two things: it filters out visitors who aren’t interested in purchasing a product and it targets customers who find themselves deeper in the sales funnel—the latter group being more likely to convert. This type of marketing spends little time speaking to people with informational intent and focuses the majority of its energy into nudging those with a buying intent to take that last step.
In contrast, branding speaks to everyone equally, regardless of their current position in the sales funnel. Its aim is to reach the broadest audience possible in the hope of, eventually, some of them remembering the brand from past exposure and converting at some indefinite point in the future.
Timeframe
Direct response campaigns are designed to bring results over the short-term and are typically tweaked based on their live performance data. Because of this, they can vary in quality, length, frequency, and consistency.
Usually, branding campaigns have more wiggle room to try out new things and more resources to apply their marketers’ creative strengths over longer time stretches. They are more consistent in both their brand messaging and the quality of their campaigns, which allows them to build trust and recognition among its target audience more easily.
Notable Direct Response and Branding Similarities
Despite their differences, direct response and branding share some similarities in their ultimate goal to acquire more customers and drive more sales. Both marketing methodologies consider the ideal customer and how to inspire them to take action.
Here are the most prominent DR and branding similarities, as outlined below.
Customer-first model
Direct response and branding place customers at the forefront of every upcoming campaign. Both approaches focus studiously on understanding their ideal audience’s behavior, critical pain points, professional and personal context, and shopping preferences to compose a message that will nudge them into first becoming a customer, and then a loyal brand ambassador further down the line.
Hybrid storytelling
Direct response copywriting is more goal-driven, while branding is mainly focused on extensive and emotionally impactful storytelling. However, both strategies have been known to dance on the precipice of emotion, on the one hand, and immediate action, on the other.
John Caples’s piano advert is the perfect example of blending the urgency of DR with the emotional rollercoaster of a classical branding campaign, all tightly wrapped into an effective package that sold millions of memberships for the then U.S. School of Music—the ad’s original initiator.
Audience feedback
Direct response campaigns can be optimized almost immediately, while branding campaigns require a waiting period to gather all the important data after the promotional materials have run their course. Needless to say, both techniques must analyze the numbers and listen to their audience’s feedback to ensure successful campaign performance in the future—even if that leads business owners to shut down heavily misaligned projects that everyone thought would do well but didn’t.
When to Use Direct Response Vs Branding
According to authors Les Binet and Peter Field in their seminal work The Long and the
Short of It, they argue about the major differences between direct response campaigns and branding-oriented approaches, which ultimately boils down to short-term vs long-term effects on the business’s health. In their study, campaigns designed to elicit short-term gains don’t translate well to long-term brand-building as people previously thought, and vice versa.
An optimal approach, according to Les and Peter, is to create powerful activators in the form of short-term direct response campaigns while developing long-term branding campaigns to let the brand gain momentum naturally over time. This ensures both short-term and long-term brand success.
However, this is not an ideal world and most businesses can’t do both approaches at the same time.
In short, small businesses and startups use direct response marketing. It’s cheaper, and it gets the job done in the short term. Major players in the corporate world layer branding on top of that or dominate popular niches by throwing resources at the problem until they outcompete or outprice the smaller players.
If you’re a small business, you can’t possibly compete with a large corporation on a level playing field. You need customers right now to survive. Given all that, marketing cannot be a speculative expense. It’s the dream of every business owner to spend $1 to get $2, effectively doubling your ROI. Thankfully, direct response marketing enables you to achieve just that, acting as both an affordable shortcut to customer acquisition and a viable short-term alternative to regular branding.
Additionally, a direct response strategy is more accessible than executing an all-encompassing branding campaign. Because of its low barrier to entry, most smaller and medium-sized businesses can focus exclusively on direct response marketing until they’re doing at least $10M/year in annual revenue.
The main exception to this rule is if you start to dominate a niche. For example, let’s assume your business does $500K per year. If you’re known as the main provider in that particular niche, it could be worth doing some additional brand marketing (on top of your direct response campaigns) to solidify your position as a market leader.
So, in a nutshell:
- Small and medium businesses (less than $10M in annual revenue) should focus on Direct Response Marketing
- Large corporations (more than $10M in annual revenue) should continuously work on developing a long-term Branding Strategy, occasionally using short-term activators to kick-start their long-term objectives into high gear
Media Mix Modelling (MMM)
A second alternative would be to go even deeper into the weeds and use a technique called Media or Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) to determine your preferred marketing strategy. MMM is a statistical analysis that measures various marketing touchpoints and their relation to your company’s ROI.
More specifically, MMM considers the impact of different marketing channels (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads), plots all of them on a graph, and tracks how much you spend on each of these approaches individually. Then, it correlates marketing spending with changes in revenue, taking into account external variables such as seasonality, campaign popularity, press coverage, organic marketing, and customer shopping trends.
When the analysis is done, Marketing Mix Modelling can be utilized to answer the following questions:
- Which campaigns have overperformed vs which ones have underperformed?
- What are the most lucrative marketing channels you can use?
- Is the press picking up a decent amount of what you’re putting out, i.e., is your organic media marketing on point?
- What is the best-performing season for your brand?
- What’s the ROI of each of your individual marketing channels?
- What are the most impactful external factors on your company’s ROI?
- What’s the best way to allocate your ad spend in the future?
- How are paid, earned, and owned media contributing to your business’s ROI?
MMM is more applicable to analyzing your direct response techniques, although it can play a valuable role in statistically determining the validity of your branding efforts as well. Once you have a clear winner between DR and branding, you can devote all your time and resources to prioritizing one over the other, or completely remove one approach from the equation in favor of the better-performing alternative.
How to Transition from Direct Response to Branding
This is a tricky situation that can quickly turn into a major pitfall if you’re not careful. Most direct response channels (Google Ads, Facebook, cold email outreach) have insanely fast feedback loops.
Meaning, you can see the ROI clearly and figure out that for every dollar you spend, you generate one more on top of it or two dollars in total. For branding, you simply can’t do the same. Or it’s extremely difficult to validate because all major branding metrics are mired in unclear KPIs such as equity, interaction, engagement, or customer sentiment, which doesn’t tell you if the campaign was a resounding success or a disappointing letdown.
Furthermore, major companies can circumvent this issue by gathering as much data as possible. They can perform detailed customer surveys in comparable cities, launch a branded campaign in one of them, and then go through all the differences step-by-step. Specialist marketing agencies are also well-equipped to do this type of work, but most small businesses can’t afford the service.
As a result, much of brand spending is very speculative. In fact, you’ll reach a much better return by collaborating with a marketer or agency that has a lot of experience with your target market, including a developed taste that matches the seasonality and mood of that market. Most business owners, individual marketers, or startup leaders don’t have this skill, so it’s better to work together with an experienced branding agency to achieve a smooth transition between your marketing paradigms.
