5th Sep 2016
1. Having the right team
Getting the right people in your team is crucial for success. Marketing is becoming more and more "everyone's job" these days and the old adage that everybody can do marketing better can be used to your advantage - so involve them! To make the campaign a success, you need the team behind you and the right team at that. Pick your team mates differently this time and know what you need them for.
Of course this is very easy to say and the art here is getting them engaged. Finding the reasons for them to get involved and how this affects them is crucial. If it's content creation or sales tactics, getting everyone bought in can be the hard bit but once they are involved in the right way, your fiercest critics can become your ambassadors.
2. Profile your audience
The more targeted your campaign is the more boxes you can tick for them. This is where getting sales or perhaps one of your best clients involved can be helpful as well as knowing who your best clients are and why. Which great ambassador of yours would turn down a lunch with you and their account manager in return for their advice on a campaign?
Getting the description of your audience from various areas of your business such as sales, finance and people involved in delivering the product or services, is as important as using the data from your CRM for this step.
3. Try direct mail
Once the objectives of the campaign are clear and your team have been engaged, you have to design your campaign and pick your first communication channels carefully. As much as you need to include them all - email, social channels and your landing page - try to grab the attention of your prospects right from the start with a channel that is not used by your competition. Make your move thought provoking and impactful.
Direct mail, for example, has an unbelievably high open rate of 92% as opposed to 10-30% open rate of email for client acquisition, yet it has been used less and less, and so the opportunity for differentiation presents itself. Whilst email is measurable in many more ways, and by no means dead like some of the articles suggest, don't sacrifice low impact of your first communication for measurement. When you can, start your campaign off with impact by sending something in the post which is creative and different. Although it may be a bit more expensive per prospect, with a focused campaign on your top end prospects, this has much more cut through and can smash your ROI through the roof for the rest of the campaign.
4. Engage the audience
"If you tell me I might hear, if you show me I might remember, but if you involve me I will understand!" - Benjamin Franklin
I have heard "engaging" being used as an adjective many times for marketing pieces, but unless you get your marketing to get your target to actually do something that is a part of a bigger picture, it is not truly engaging in my opinion.
So it's not only downloading a white paper that they may or may not read, subscribing to a list that they will shortly unsubscribe from, it's about getting them involved a bit more right there and then.
So asking a question in a webinar, taking part of a survey, or competing in a challenge in a quiz or a game that gets them thinking and will leave your brand front of mind for the time for your sales team need. Having this step as easy, interesting or as fun as possible for your target audience is key.
5. Outside help
Last but not least - get some help. Picking the right team from the start can have many benefits. Choose someone from the outside as part of that. Getting that external perspective and helping you to get buy in, create some engaging concepts that will turn heads and will ultimately make all the difference to your campaign. It's why our clients continue using us time after time.
