Marketing is a journey—our trip routing and milestones will keep you on course.
Marketing program development and campaign management is an exercise in budgeting and project management as well as accountability.
We understand that if you had the skillset and in-house resources to effectively conduct your own marketing efforts, you wouldn’t have engaged us to begin with. That’s why we’re here, at every turn, to help “drive the bus” and keep your marketing activities moving forward.
After our initial Messaging Strategy Session with new clients, we conduct a granular evaluation of each proposed activity, realizing that you may be best served by handling certain things internally, outsourcing others to our team and pushing lower priorities or more complex tasks to a later date.
Going forward, we maintain a marketing campaign calendar and engage in monthly status meetings to review web and social metrics as well event and email campaign performance reports.
Our account management team works alongside your leadership, sales and/or marketing staff to evaluate progress against goals, make adjustments in campaign activities to reflect evolving business requirements and hold responsible parties (inside and outside of the organization) accountable to marketing, program and communications objectives.
This collaborative approach to vision setting and prioritization allows you to help control budget by determining precisely which tactics you want to tackle and when.
Recommended Reading
Once is Not a Marketing Campaign
If I had a dollar for the number of times that a business owner told me they tried marketing once and it didn’t work for them, I would be driving a much nicer car.
Marketing is not like lima beans, you can’t try them once and make a decision on the spot that it doesn’t work for you. Yet I continue to run into businesses who use that excuse when I suggest that better or more targeting marketing efforts might improve their bottom line. I try to give the benefit of the doubt when meeting a new biz owner and assume that they are at least doing something — thus the suggestion that there might be room for improvement — but that isn’t always the case.
One direct mail campaign, one e-mail blast or one display ad is, for a great many, a waste of money. There are lots of rules about the number of impressions required before your audience recognizes and reacts to your offer — with somewhere between 3 and 7 as the rule of thumb — but the general idea here is that you have to keep plugging along.
The first time your audience sees your message they may not even recognize it. The second time it may trigger some kind of awareness of the product category or offering. Hopefully by the third time they’ll remember your name.
The key is not only awareness and recognition but being in the right place at the right time: when your best prospect is ready to make a purchase decision. Sure, once in a while those single wave campaigns actually land in the lap of a prospect at the right time and they get the business. But this is pure luck that rides on the back of a competitor that already established awareness and education for the product category.
When I worked for a direct marketing firm, we typically planned all campaigns in 3 waves. Today we encourage clients who want to see the greatest ROI to invest only in programs that they can sustain for a full year.