With content-on-demand, the disappearance of prime time, and fragmented audiences accessing information from phones, phablets, and glasses (to name a few), it takes a holistic marketing approach to reach and disrupt in today’s world. The best campaigns are those that find the balance between scintillating content and 360 marketing. Today, we bring you behind the curtain and share agency secrets on how to mix it up Brandemix-style!
Define the “product”.
This is whatever you’re promoting. It could be a product, a sale, a trip to the moon, or something more informational — a conference, a webinar, a white paper, a newsletter, a slide show, or some other offering that has value to your audience or your business.
Determine the call to action.
What do you want your audience to do? Buy, sell, download, sign up, attend, click, share? Whatever it is, all your integrated marketing will be based on making that action happen. Some recent studies have indicated that multiple calls to action can work, but right now, I think best practice means a single, clear CTA. In the case study below, I wanted people to register for a free webinar.
A simple, direct call to action
Launch the promotional channels.
This is where the “integrated” part comes in. You need to promote the product and call to action in a consistent manner across as many channels as possible. That means using the same keywords, taglines, logos, colors, and any other distinguishing characteristic to create what I call a holistic and aligned disruption. Inconsistent messaging dilutes the messaging and causes confusion, as your audience won’t be certain if they already fulfilled the call to action. Which channels? For our webinar, we wrote a sort of “sneak preview” blog post and published it two weeks before the event. A few days later, we shot a video teaser, giving away a few “fun facts” but mostly pointing people to register:
Video promoting the webinar
We also posted the link on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. We posted it as a status update on our LinkedIn company page and in relevant LinkedIn groups that I belong to. Finally, we included a plug for the webinar and a link to register in our monthly newsletter.
Track the clicks.
This way, you’ll know what’s working. We used our email server to track clicks from the newsletter and bit.ly to track links that were posted everywhere else. When we found that Twitter was bringing more sign-ups than other social networks, we adjusted our promotion accordingly.
Bit.ly tracks clicks and referrers
We included another way to analyze the traffic by asking on the registration form, “Where did you hear about us?”
Re-engage.
A new product or event is a great time to re-engage your email recipients. Every email list has “no-shows,” who never open the emails but also don’t unsubscribe. Brand Driven Digital recently conducted a case study on sending these silent spectators a final “We miss you!” email that allowed them to leave the mailing list once and for all or click a “confirm” link to stick around. Amazingly, the study found that 39% of recipients opened the email, 41% took action to stay on the list, and only 7% either actively or passively left. How many hundreds or thousands of your mailing list recipients just need a little goad like that to become more engaged?
An example of a final “We miss you!” email to re-engage recipients
Putting it all together.
Finally, of course, we held the webinar. It not only promoted the agency to a new audience but also gave me a new list of warm leads to connect with in the ensuing weeks and months. Those who registered but didn’t attend received a variation of the “We miss you” email, giving them another chance to engage with me. In a way, integrated content marketing is easy because, once you create the content, all you have to is re-purpose it. Our content was a webinar, but on Twitter, it was just one “fun fact” and a link. On Facebook, it was an infographic. On YouTube, it was a short video. But they all included the full name of the webinar, a link to register, and the keywords and search terms we wanted to capture. Clear, consistent, and compelling. As an agency that has launched successful content marketing campaigns for clients of all types and sizes, no doubt we can help you with yours. Write us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.
