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I don’t know about you, but
each month I receive hundreds of email solicitations promising
to deliver thousands of new website visitors overnight. I put
those in the same file as the “do nothing and earn $10,000 per
week from home” advertisements. Just as Wall Street has
learned, the Internet hasn’t changed all the rules.
Successful marketing campaigns still require creativity,
planning, and old-fashioned sweat. Money isn’t the secret
ingredient. The beauty of guerrilla marketing is it forces
businesses to think creatively and leverage every available
resource.
Too many times, a business will base a marketing strategy
around a budget, instead of the end goal. Unfortunately,
too often it shows. Whether it’s a million-dollar TV spot
during the Super Bowl, a new business-to-business product
launch, or a banner ad campaign for a small website, we’ve
all seen examples of misdirected marketing. Although many
won’t admit it, there’s just as much wasteful spending on
Madison Avenue as in Washington D.C. Effective marketing
campaigns are won or lost in the tactics, not in the
budgets. It is critical to develop marketing campaign
strategies from a tactical, or guerrilla, perspective,
regardless of budget.
Identify the End Goal.
Start with identifying the
end goal of your marketing campaign. What event or “call
to action” are you trying to accomplish? Is it to sell more
widgets through your offline sales reps? Are you trying to
generate more affiliate revenue from your website? Are you
trying to register more visitors through your website? Are
you trying to keep your company’s name in the minds of past
and prospective customers?
Okay, now keep working backwards from a tactical perspective.
What will quantify your end goal? What’s your benchmark for
success? As an example, let’s assume your end goal is to
register more website visitors. This means you want more
visitors to submit their name, email address, demographic
information, or possibly other information. It doesn’t take
much thought to realize how valuable that would be. For our
purposes, let’s say our goal is to increase website
registrations from 0.5% to 2% of total visitors.
Cause the Reaction.
Now, ask the question of why your
website visitors would give their personal contact
information. The short answer is a bribe. Users need to
perceive a value or benefit of offering their contact info.
Common benefits include getting access to special website
content, receiving special promotions from the company, or
free subscription to an email newsletter. Other examples are
membership for loyalty programs, personalized website content,
registered-user sections of the website, free email accounts,
or product giveaways or contest entries. Some of these
tactics will require larger budgets. Some simply require a
little creative thinking about ways you can leverage things of
value at your company. Evaluate the talents and strengths of
your internal employees, including that quiet kid in the
mailroom. Do the same with your outside suppliers, marketing
partners, and even your best customers. A little
brainstorming can spark great ideas for incentives you can
offer to registered website visitors. For example, you could
create an email newsletter with informative features about the
production of your product, a spotlight of how your top client
uses your product, industry-related cartoon drawn by the
mailroom kid, and a special offer from one of your partner
companies.
The Medium.
How and where do you promote your campaign
(i.e. free newsletter)? Think through the communication
outlets that will not require out-of-pocket cash. These
include every “point of contact” with customers and
prospective customers. For example, you could add a
promotional flyer with product shipments, a blurb on the
company’s incoming phone greeting, a text ad on every outgoing
email and fax, promo graphics on your delivery trucks, and
other internal outlets. The costs associated with most of
these activities can be absorbed into existing expenses.
Next, go back to your suppliers, clients, and partners. Are
there some ways they can help? For example, could you include
a promotional flyer in their own product shipments in exchange
for banner advertising space on your website? They may want
to place advertising or contribute a feature article in your
email newsletter. Keep brainstorming. You may be able to
exchange banner ads or newsletter content with one of these
partners. Best of all, this marketing relationship may turn
into other joint ventures down the road.
Okay, now it’s time to evaluate any available budgets for
pay-based marketing. Of course, you can always buy print ads,
place banner ads, send direct mail, or other traditional
advertising. However, first ask yourself what ways can best
complement the no-cost, “guerrilla” marketing tactics
previously discussed? For example, is it logical to jointly
purchase print ads, send direct mail, jointly write a feature
article for a trade magazine, or share booth space at the next
tradeshow, with one of your partners? All of these will cost
money. However, sharing costs will maximize budgets and
further strengthen industry partnerships.
The Measurement.
Well, your campaign is a success…or
is it? A critical component of every marketing activity
is measuring its performance against the activity’s
objective. The form of measurement needs to be designed and
developed PRIOR to launching the campaign. Ideally,
quantitative variables, such as new registrations for an email
newsletter, should be used. Other examples of quantitative
measurements are tracking volumes for phone numbers published
only in certain print ads or mail pieces, or monitoring sales
volumes for a particular advertised product.
Some marketing campaigns don’t lend themselves to those type
of black-and-white results. Your company may undergo a
campaign to reposition its brand, counter negative publicity,
or other objectives unrelated to lead generation and sales
volumes. This can be can be especially complicated if these
types of awareness campaigns are launched simultaneous to more
quantitative sales campaigns. For example, awareness
campaigns may include the same website address as the
sales-focused print ads. How do you really know if the
awareness campaigns are working? Some ways to counter
this confusion include the following:
-
Stagger the timing of the campaigns and minimize the overlap
of multiple campaigns
-
Aggressively track how prospective customers heard about the
company, including manually tracking by sales reps, customer
service reps, website inquiry forms, and other points of
customer contact
-
Perform both a pre-campaign survey and a post-campaign
survey to evaluate changes in general awareness, brand
perception, or other objectives. While this requires higher
costs, it is very effective in judging PR and awareness
campaigns.
A
pitfall for some businesses is looking only at closed sales to
evaluate effectiveness of a marketing campaign or entire
strategy. Marketing and promotion is an important step in
business development, but not necessarily the only critical
element. All points of customer contact, including sales
representatives and the entire sales cycle process, needs to
be analyzed and well aligned to any marketing activities.
Sales and customer service teams need to be fully invested in
all marketing campaigns. It is not enough to notify these
teams about an upcoming advertising campaign, since its
success will rely heavily on their performance. Again, the
impacts and measurement of a campaign should be done PRIOR to the launch.
Marketing doesn’t need to be
complicated. However, successful marketing does merit careful
planning. The critical expense is not the graphic design fees
or placement costs. Those are the easy parts. Devising a
campaign that is misaligned with sales channels or achieves
misdirected goals is the biggest waste of money. Don’t throw
money at the problem. Step back, think like a prospective
customer, and walk through your internal sales cycle. Do this
frequently and consistently throughout your entire
organization. A good marketing plan is a living, evolving
document…don’t kill it by locking it away in dusty file
cabinet!
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