Have you been bombarded with a company’s marketing strategy that seemed to do more damage with spam than it did captivate? We’ve all been there.
It's the combination of atrocious design, poor verbiage, loud or drab colors or just targeting the wrong market (eg: the abundance of “Dear Jenn, this is what you have been waiting for to help you please that special someone…..” Viagra promotions sent to me.) Dude…really…
Let's look back at my own marketing strategy experience at work.
Creating promotions to drive traffic to our trade show booths, launching new products or getting people to follow us on our Twitter and Facebook accounts - I’m going to try to elaborate on the way we planned a promotion using social media as one of our channels:
1. Determine your objective: During the launch of one of our eco-friendly bags (made from recycled plastic bottles), the marketing director and I collaborated to create a promotion for trade show booth traffic emphasizing on the “green” aspect of our product.
2. Determine your audience’s aptitude: The first steep was contacting the association (who coordinated the trade show) for their pre-show attendee list. Then getting in touch with the 15,000 pre-show attendees via direct mailer and email blast informing them of our contest: a chance to win a TomTom GPS.
3. Carefully select your platform and tools: Using hootsuite that fed into twitter and fb (the theory of “killing 2 birds with 1 stone”) helped us reach out to even more people who were not attending the trade show. We were actually able to do drive them to our website and introduce them to our new product.
4. Avoid content overload – curate the most interesting pieces: the direct mailer was concise, colorful, yet without the overbearing jumble of design.
The rules listed on the back of the mailer (or on our email blast) the were simple and direct: 1) bring the direct mailer or a print-out of the email to our booth. 2) then pick out a bottle cap out of a bin filled with thousands of caps (our bags were made from recycled bottles…hence the bottle caps. Get it?) 3) the person who drew the bottle cap spray painted in gold was the winner of a TomTom GPS!
5. Empower your employees to build their personal brand: On the day of the trade show (prior to the opening of the doors) my boss and I walked the lobby and told people about our promotion.
For those who didn’t receive a direct mailer/email, we gave each a green bottle cap which they would use as their “ticket” into the contest (and was our way to keep track last minute participation.) We were also able to increased our email database because in order for them to participate, they needed to give us their email address.
6. Measure the initiative’s success against your objectives: To monitor the success of our direct mailer, we asked for all those that either received the direct mailer or email, to please bring it with them when they came for the drawing (we redeemed them as they entered the contest).
The booth drive was a hit! It did exactly what we had planned – drew thousands of attendees to our booth and increased sales of our new product. And everyone who entered into the contest those left with a sample of our new eco-friendly bag. So regardless if they won the contest or not, they all “won” a gift.
Being able to utilize my creative vibe to the max is why I love marketing and what i do.
…jenn olivencia
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