Editor's note: Lucy Davison is managing director at Keen as Mustard, a London marketing agency. Davison can be reached at lucy@mustardmarketing.com.

For marketing researchers, one of the best ways to market your services is through delivering great content directly to potential customers. While communicating the value of your services, you are offering value by imparting knowledge in your field of expertise. Digital direct marketing is also particularly helpful for marketers, as it can be closely monitored for effectiveness. Using a service like dotMailer or MailChimp allows you to track who read what and measure results against previous efforts (i.e., investigate whether an e-newsletter, educational e-mail or invitation is the most engaging and which subject lines, styles of writing, images, sender, etc., are the most effective).

Here are my tips for engaging with your audience directly.

1. Set your objectives and track continually.

The whole point of digital direct marketing is that the technology allows you to continuously track and review results. Simply checking Google Analytics on your site can give you an idea of what is working and what is not. Add to this a simple e-mail marketing package that tracks opens and click-through rates and you have a good quasi-scientific sense of what is resulting from your activities. In doing so, you can ensure you are contacting people who have already engaged with you, who have expressed an interest and who are open to conversations about doing business together.

2. Clean up your database.

You have two objectives here: 1) to have a good database of existing and potential clients that you can interact with and 2) to grow that database. With every set of mailings and contacts, you will have people who unsubscribe, who want their information in another way or who are simply not interested. You will also attract new followers, fans and potential clients. But you will need to start with a really clean database and a strategy for how you are going to grow it.

3. Plan.

We recommend a six-month calendar of content with responsibilities and deadlines. One person needs to be driving this to ensure everyone adheres to deadlines. If the plan is not realistic, forget it and start again with a less ambitious one. Digital direct marketing is only worth doing if it’s regular and if the content is good.

The most effective way to use content is to recycle it into as many different formats as you can, ensuring that the audience will be gaining something new each time. So your plan should probably include a blog, a regular e-newsletter or news e-mail/video and white papers. You can add Webinars and social media activity to further spread the word but for the purpose of this article, I will focus on blogs, e-newsletters, videos and white papers.

Blogs

Blogs are a great medium because they are created on a platform that you own – your company Web site. Blogs attract customers to your site and make it more easily findable. By blogging with the right keywords and phrases in your headlines, image ALT tags, blog post URLs and page content, you improve your visibility on search engines and can grow your database.

Position yourself as a thought leader. If your blog posts are well-written, well-researched, documented and informative, you will gain credibility in your industry and from customers and prospects. They will be likely to return to your blog again and encourage others to do the same. Keep blogs short and sweet and integrate visuals wherever possible. And, of course, keep them coming consistently. There’s no need to blog daily or even weekly but try to keep the content fresh and relevant – at least once every two weeks. If you can’t manage that within your organization, reconsider if a blog is the right tool for you.

E-newsletters

Think hard about your target audience and what they are looking for. Perhaps segment your database and target your material appropriately. Create content that is short, well-written and well-designed. You can use a template from an e-mail service for this but of course we’d recommend using a professional who will create and design content tailored for your audience.

Videos

Conveying facts and figures in short videos is attention-grabbing. It’s no surprise that YouTube is now more popular than Facebook for B2B marketing! Data-driven videos should tell the story, be simple (one big number is enough for each question) and memorable.

White papers

The nature of marketing research lends itself to white papers because researchers have so much data at their disposal. White papers are longer and more formal than blogs and usually presented as PDFs. The more academic, evidence-based, thought-leadership style is common in MR but just because they’re called white papers doesn’t mean they have to be black-and-white. White papers can express your business’s color and personality and animate your content in a way blogs don’t.

From a marketing perspective, the PDF format is particularly useful when it comes to generating leads because the content needs to be downloaded from your site. When a white paper is downloaded, you can capture contact details for your database and follow-ups.

Prioritize it

The key to successful digital direct marketing is to prioritize it. It reaps great rewards but will not do so unless it is regular and the content is great. To achieve that, have an agency or someone within your organization who is responsible for its production and distribution. Secondly, keep reassessing your efforts. Stay on top of your Google Analytics, click-through rates and social following and learn all the time. Be prepared to adapt what you are doing and remember that a digital conversation should be like a real conversation: two-way and engaging!