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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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Run a marketing campaign in just one day Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. Do you ever get frustrated that too many of your marketing campaign materials are still being written, designed, approved or published - when they should have been finished a long time ago? Unfortunately, marketing professionals and business owners have at least 50 things to do at any one time. So it's no wonder that each time they reach the next step in putting campaign materials together, there's often a delay. If the campaign involves writing, designing and publishing a brochure, or creating a new web site, there might be up to 20 or more steps. 20 two-day delays add up to 40 working days. That's a big delay of two months. (And some projects are held up even longer.) So what if you wanted to take a practical, realistic approach to kick-starting your marketing activity? And what if you wanted to do it without spending a lot of money? That's the challenge that many of my small business customers face every day, and some marketing managers in big companies too. Here's one way you can quickly raise your visibility in a low-cost, low-time way. Start tomorrow morning and you'll be finished in time for tea and doughnuts at 4.00 pm. It starts with you taking an hour or two to write an article that will be of INTEREST and of VALUE to the people you want to reach. So if you are a plumber in the domestic market, you could write an article entitled 'How to stop your pipes freezing this winter'. If you are a mortgage lender targeting buy-to-let investors, you could write something called 'Avoiding the negative equity trap: an essential guide for buy-to-let investors'. Writing the article should be fairly easy, because you have loads of expertise - way beyond the level of your target audience. The article doesn't need to be very long, but it does need to be of real value to people. So it's not a plug for your business. OK. So you start writing the article at 10.00 am. It's finished by noon. It doesn't need to be professionally designed - just get someone who is good with Word to format it onto regular A4 sheets. Then you can send it to anyone else in your company who needs to approve it. While you're waiting for approval, you do some or all of these: 1. Write a press release to send to the publications your target customers read (national press and/or specialist & trade publications). This announces that you have produced the article, and tells people how they can order their copy. Call it a 'guide' or 'fact sheet' or something similar to make it sound impressive. 2. Write a letter to appropriate people on your customer database. Sell the benefits of reading the article, and tell them how they can request it. OR Just write a covering letter to send with the article to the people on your database. By now it's probably 1.30 pm so take a break, nip out to the shops for the doughnuts and come back refreshed to finish the campaign. 3. Add a simple page to your web site, with essentially the same message as the first letter mentioned in point 2 above. OR Create space on your web site to add the article itself. 4. If you produce a customer magazine, tell the editor about the article and get them to reserve space for it in the next issue. 5. Email the relevant contacts in any trade or specialist publications and ask whether they might be interested in publishing the article. 6. Find out what events/exhibitions/networking opportunities are coming up and arrange for someone from your company to be there to hand out the article. It's now 3.00 pm and your article has been approved. All you do now is send out the press release, print and post the client letters and update the web site. You don't even have to print the article yet - you can do that as each request for it arrives. Now it's 4.00 pm. Time for tea and doughnuts. You see how just one article has given you at least six opportunities to raise the VISIBILITY and CREDIBILITY of your company? OK - I admit it - I've been a bit flippant here. Maybe it'll take a bit longer to do all of this. But seriously, I have achieved all of the above in less than a day many times. In fact, my business has been built on a series of low cost, low time, but high-value mini-campaigns, just like this one. If you did something like this every month, you would almost certainly start to build stronger relationships with customers and potential customers. I'm not saying this is the ONLY way to market your business, or that it's right for everyone. But if you aren't doing as much campaign work as you'd like, this type of approach is one easy way to kick-start your activity. Copyright 2003 Richard Groom |