|
How to Create a Marketing Campaign
The word “campaign”
suggests one important thing: coordinating a variety of
activities over the course of time. Effective marketing is NOT
doing one thing—placing a single ad or sending one mailing—when
you need business.
A marketing campaign
means sending your message to the right people in a variety of
ways on a consistent basis.
After creating and
implementing hundreds of marketing campaigns for clients in just
about every industry imaginable (from legal services and plastic
surgeons to silicon wafer processing equipment, paintball
fields, remodeling contractors and tattoo equipment
manufacturers), a handful of elements kept coming up as
essential. That is, when we left one out, we paid the price.
Learn from our experience:
Make multiple touches
This is perhaps one
of the two most important pieces of advice for business owners
that exists on this site. . .or perhaps on the planet (The
other: Touch enough people).
Once you know who
you want to contact, contact them regularly.
Why? Four reasons:
1. Things change
Your message arrives
today. But I’m: having a bad day; 48 hours from a major project
deadline; covering for a sick employee; have a sick child; cash
poor; don’t have a need for what you’re selling right now;
or just not interested in your offer for one of a gazillion
other reasons.
So, increase the
odds of hitting me when I’m open to your offer by hitting me
multiple times.
2. No single
contact is rarely so powerful that it is the magic bullet
Everybody wants that
magically single ad, mailing, email or whatever that changes
everything. Myth! We mortals must accept that most of the time
the persuasion process takes place over time as the result of
multiple contacts.
3. People are
people
People looking for a
relationship typically don’t have much luck with a strategy of
“Hi, my name is Hamilton, how about dinner, a movie and sex?”
Sounds absurd, right? Well, how different is the expectation a
perfect stranger will buy from you the first time you contact
them? People need a degree of comfort before they act.
Multiple contacts help build comfort.
4. People are
different
People have dominant
(and different!) styles for accessing information. I’m not
going into a psychological discussion here. Suffice to say:
lots of information turns off visual learners; lots of pictures
and little “data” turn off auditory learners. And on and on.
Touching people often gives you the opportunity to vary your
approach (see “Vary the type of touches” below).
How many touches are enough (in one year)?
That depends on your
product’s sales or decision cycle-
The longer the sales
cycle, the fewer contacts you need. It’s just the opposite for
short sales cycle products. A decent rule of thumb:
Front load the
contacts (monthly) to establish some degree of familiarity with
prospects. Then you can taper off a bit, depending on response
(every other month, then quarterly).
Touch a lot of people
Many owners I talk
to tell me right off the bat, “Direct mail doesn’t work!” When
I ask how many people they send to it’s usually a very low
number; 50, 300, 600, something like that. That’s just not
enough—the odds are too low.
Think about it.
Only a small percentage of the people you touch are open to your
offer at any one time (see “Make multiple touches” above).
Direct response marketing experts estimate that (assuming a very
well qualified list of prospects) that only 20% of the people
you contact are open to what you’re selling at any one time.
Your goal, then: to convert as many of that 20% as you can.
Do the math.
Contact 300 prospects and only 60 people are real
prospects at that time. That’s not many people to put
your message in front of—not very good odds. Contact 3,000 and
your real prospects grow to 600 people at any one time. Better
odds.
How many people should you contact?
I generally tell my
clients, local or national, to test with a “small” number
first. But you need at least 1,500 to 2,500 people to give your
offer a reasonable test.
Vary the type of touches
Simply put, don’t be
a bore, be a resource. You don’t want to hear the same old
line, “Hey are you ready for new accounting software, here’s why
ours is really great, please buy from us!”, over and over
again. Mix it up. Send me information I might be interested in
related to accounting or accounting software (7 ways to save
money on your next accounting software purchase, how the new
accounting rule changes affect small business, etc.). Mix in a
value added touch every 2nd or 3rd time.
What kind of touches?
I can’t answer that
for you because I don’t know your product or target customer.
But I know how to find out. Ask 10 customers (the type you want
more of) the following questions:
How do companies
like ours contact you (mail, email, ads, they don’t, etc.)?
How do you prefer to
be contacted by firms like ours?
If you were director
of marketing for a firm like ours, how would you get the word
out about our product people like yourself?
They will very
likely tell you exactly what to do. Or at the very least, give
you clues.
Actual client
examples-
Be visually consistent
The message here is
a simple one. While you need to vary the type of contacts you
make, all need to present the same look, tone and feel. In
other words, if you toss your materials on a table with 15
others, yours need to cause someone to say, “Oh, yeah, that one,
that one and that one must be from the same company.”
Conclusion
The best advice I
can give you, not knowing a single thing about your product or
target customer: contact a lot more people than you do now;
contact them a lot more often than you contact them now; and
vary the type of contacts, or touches, you make.
Do these things and
your sales will increase. Refine your message and the visual
elements of your contacts and sales will increase even more. .
.but that’s another workshop!
Good luck!
|
Our
Mission 
