Mannaging Cross-Media

For the last few years, One-To-One Marketing has become a catch-all term for the process of developing more personal relationships with both potential and established clients. The range of communications outlets is growing daily, and it is no longer just a matter of getting someone’s name right on an attractive postcard.

Preparing For Your Cross-Media Program Part 3: What Comes After? Think About It Now.

You’ve come up with your marketing approach, you’ve identified your target audience and all public aspects of your business are ready for increased scrutiny. All you need to do at this point is give the OK to get your message out into the world. Are you truly ready for whatever happens? Rarely is your marketing campaign going to match your expections. Some will do better, some will not do as well, some will have some unexpected challenges. You need to be prepared for the campaign after-life.

We had a client that was giving away a small flashlight as their offer and they had sent us 500 of them, expecting a 3% response rate on the direct mail piece/pURL we had set up for them. I have no idea why we decided to actually try some of these flashlights out, but we did and found that nearly half of them were damaged by acid that had leaked out of the batteries and didn’t work. We immediately contacted our client and told them the situation. They gave us the OK to go ahead with the mailing anyway – the problem would only be a problem if the campaign was a success. You guessed it… within the first two days we had more responses than we had working flashlights and fulfillment was held up for scores of potential clients while we waited for a second shipment of flashlights to arrive.

Here are just a few potential gotchas that might need to be addressed before your campaign is launched:

1. If your offer is a physical product, do you have enough? Will it meet the expectations of your client?

2. If your offer is a virtual product, do you have the infrastructure to meet the increased traffic or the IT personnel to deal with delivery obstacles?

3. Do you have a thank-you message printed (or prepared as an e-mail) to accompany the delivery of your offer?

4. If you intend follow-up communications you need to make sure that your data structure is set up to easily create new lists. For instance: if you wish to send out a second wave of mailings to non-responders you need to have a process that takes all of the responders out of the original list. This is something you don’t want to do by hand.

5. If a triggered e-mail is going to one of your sales staff, do you have a plan in place to re-route that email if that salesperson is unavailable?

Think ahead… try to have a plan in place to cover every possible scenario. You can’t be prepared for everything, and the biggest challenges are usually the biggest surprises, but keeping your “what if” muscles in shape will help you rise to any occasion.

For the last few years, One-To-One Marketing has become a catch-all term for the process of developing more personal relationships with both potential and established clients. The range of communications outlets is growing daily, and it is no longer just a matter of getting someone’s name right on an attractive postcard.

Preparing For Your Cross-Media Program Part 2: Are You Ready For Your Close-up?

Your business may very well be prepared to handle an increase in sales volume, but how prepared are you to handle an increase in visibility? A cross-media program is certain to shine a light on other aspects of your business, and previously well-hidden flaws may very well become all-too apparent.

Every aspect of every existing avenue of communication you presently use should be assessed before a cross-media program is initiated. For example – if your website is in disarray, is difficult to navigate or isn’t up to date a cross-media campaign isn’t going to overcome it. You have only one chance to make a good first impression, and a lost client is literally a single mouse click away.

Here are some aspects of your business that might need to pass the scrutiny test:

1. Your corporate web presence
2. Your social media outlets:
if you have Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn accounts and/or a blog, make sure that there’s been some recent activity.
3. Your help desk/phone presence (online and offline)
4. Your brick-and-mortar outlets and the people who staff them:
at the very least give your staff a heads-up that a cross-media program is going to hit.
5. Existing printed collateral
6. Other communication outlets (newsletters, email broadcasts…)
7. Existing data, and the structure of your databases:
a successful cross-media program will enrich your existing data and (hopefully) add new records. Are your databases (and the people who handle them) set up and ready?

Understand that any potential client is going to do a little research, much (but not all) of it online. It might entail some extra work, but improving every aspect of your public “face” before you engage in a Cross-Media campaign is an important step toward ensuring your success.

For the last few years, One-To-One Marketing has become a catch-all term for the process of developing more personal relationships with both potential and established clients. The range of communications outlets is growing daily, and it is no longer just a matter of getting someone’s name right on an attractive postcard.

Preparing For Your Cross-Media Program Part 1: You Can Pick Your Friends…

The implementation of any kind of marketing campaign begins with identifying exactly who you will be marketing your product to. Categorizing your target market can be as simple as separating existing clients from potential clients or as complex as drilling down by age, gender, location, income level, type of items purchased, amount spent on those purchases, how many TVs in the household… the possibilities are endless.

Is there a level of demographic granulization beyond which we see diminishing returns? Probably, but where do you draw the line? Every day we get mailings from companies that want to sell us something, some are addressed to “Current Resident”, some are addressed to a name, some include personalization, some actually seem like sincere invitations to form an ongoing relationship. All of these mailings are relegated to the trash bin if the product and the potential buyer are not a match. Marketing steaks to vegetarians, homeowners insurance to renters, day-care services to grandparents… we see this sort of thing all the time, and it’s an incredible waste of money and resources.

Here are some important steps to ensure cross-media success:

1. Refine your list – get rid of as many records as possible who aren’t likely to buy your product. Identify your “ideal” customer and determine how far away from the ideal you believe you can stray before the sell becomes too difficult to be worth the effort.

2. Personalize your message in as many ways as is possible – swap out images and blocks of text and customize your offers according to whatever data you have available to you. Multiple marketing messages greatly increase your chances of increasing sales, and by doing this you are in essence “personalizing” your product and your identity.

3. Engage the potential buyer – you need the client to want your product, but you also need the client to want to buy it from YOU.

4. If you are including an offer, make sure that it is relevant, generous and has some sort of implied exclusivity. You’ve done a lot of work to identify a target audience and you believe you have what they want – prove it by making an offer that will initially entice and ultimately satisfy.

These are four small steps, but they greatly improve your chances of making meaningful connections with potential clients. When it comes to marketing a product, the brute-force approach is becoming less and less viable as time goes on – a more surgical approach ultimately saves time, energy, money and land-fill space.