This article will compare the benefits of telemarketing over traditional marketing. For the purposes of this article, the term “telemarketing” means contacting prospects or customers by calling them on the phone and traditional marketing includes ways of delivering marketing messages to customers without calling them, such as ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, ads on radio and TV and more.
Telemarketing allows you to craft individual marketing messages
No matter what product or service you sell, different people buy it for different reasons. For some people, it may be convenience. For others, it may be the price. For yet someone else, it may be about the relationship they have with you or your company and about knowing that they will get the product or service on time exactly as described and to them, this confidence is much more important than finding a similar product or service at a lower price.
At the same time, when you advertise your product or service using a traditional marketing channel, you always have to deal with the issue of limited space. If you are advertising on the radio, your commercial can only be so long. If you are advertising in a newspaper, you have the space you pay for. TV commercials also have time restrictions. Even ads on Google, Facebook, and other platforms have the same restrictions.
You do have more freedom with direct mail, but if you try to create a lengthy description of your product or service that encompasses all the reasons why people may choose to buy it, then the description may come out to be so long that the direct mail piece would be extremely expensive.
None of these limitations exist with telemarketing because a telemarketing call can be a dialog. Your telemarketers can not only talk about your product or service but also ask questions to get to know the customers better, which, in turn, means that they will be able to sell better by tweaking your marketing message in such a way that it speaks to the person on the phone.
With telemarketing, you are not limited to a small geographical territory
With traditional marketing, you are typically limited to a certain territory. If you are buying ads in a newspaper or a magazine, the newspaper or the magazine would only have a certain distribution area.
Even if you are buying advertising in a national newspaper, the newspaper is likely to have different versions for various parts of the country and ads are going to be one of those differences, meaning that if you wanted to have all the versions to have your ads, you would have to pay much more compared to getting ads in just one edition.
With telemarketing, you can be calling prospects or customers in any part of the country or the world. Today, it doesn’t cost more to make a phone call from New York to California compared to a call from New York to New York. Practically speaking, this means that no matter where your customers are located, the price you pay per call is not going to go up.
Telemarketing is scalable
With traditional marketing, the fact that something works in one part of the country does not necessarily mean that it will work in a different part of the country. First, there are obvious differences between various regions, such as weather, climate, and economy. Second, there are non-obvious differences that include cultural and historical preferences.
When you use traditional marketing, figuring out such preferences will take time and is likely to be expensive. If you have an ad that works, you will be tempted to try the same ad in a different location. If the ad doesn’t work in the new location, you will try to figure out why it doesn’t work. All of this is time and money.
You can scale telemarketing campaigns much easier. You would probably follow the same process and first try to use scripts and approaches that work. The difference between telemarketing and other types of marketing is that if the process doesn’t work, you will know that right away. Tweaking the process effectively is also much easier because you have telemarketers who talk to people and can quickly figure out why people would and would not buy from you.
Telemarketing is not visible to the competition
With most traditional marketing methods, with the exception of direct mail, everything you do is visible to the competition, which means that the competition can copy your successful ads and commercials. When you advertise in newspapers, TV, and radio, your competitors can pretend to be your prospects to see if you have a sales funnel and/or follow-up scripts and systems. With telemarketing, your competition can’t see anything. You choose whom you call and your competitors have no way of knowing whom you are calling when you are calling them or what your conversion rate and call volume are.
