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DEFINING INSIGHTS

Introducing the Interactive Roadmap

Friday, April 17, 2009 by Ira Gross
The mantra of our time seems to be “do more with less.”  Nowhere in business is this sentiment more pronounced than marketing.  With the economy in free fall and marketing budgets slashed to the bone, maintaining market share, let alone growing market share, is more difficult than ever.  Enter the Interactive Marketing Roadmap.

One of the keys to “doing more with less” is reuse.  Most marketing organizations spend a lot of resources developing marketing collateral for various tradition channels.  These artifacts include direct mail pieces, television spots, brochures, catalogues and the like.  The goal of the interactive marketing roadmap is to identify the optimal re-use of these items on the web.  The challenge is to employ limited incremental spend to leverage existing assets created in traditional channels for re-purposing in the web channel.  Definition 6 has spent a lot of time and intellectual capital trying to address this challenge.  Via our Interactive Marketing Roadmap, you can get the benefit of this cumulative effort and knowledge base.

So let’s start with a simple example.  Your company is about to launch a new product, so the marketing manager has created a new direct mail piece to explain the offering.  For educational purposes, let us say that it cost one dollar for the design, development and distribution of the direct mail piece.  And let us also assume the target market for this effort is 50,000 households.  That would equate to a cost of $50,000 to reach 50,000 prospects, or $1.00 per prospect.  If the piece got a 2% conversion rate, the program would be considered wildly successful.  More likely, most of the direct mail pieces end up in the circular file.  And identifying the one’s that didn’t is no easy task.  Plus, the “shelf life” of the entire promotion is no more than a week or two.

Now, let us leverage the Interactive Marketing Roadmap.  In this instance, we would identify the best re-use of the promotional direct mail package for the web.  First, we would most likely turn the direct mail copy into a targeted email marketing campaign.  The cost to turn the direct mail content into an email friendly version is a few thousand dollars.  Then there is the cost of the email blast, usually no more than pennies per email.  So we can spend $5,000 to make the direct mail piece email friendly, and spend an additional $2,500 on email distribution.  At that point, we can blast the email to 100,000 prospects for roughly $7,500.  Hence we tripled the total audience of the initial direct mail piece for an incremental spend of less than 20% of the cost of the original direct mail piece.  And click through and conversion rates from targeted email marketing campaigns is in the 4% conversion range.  At even less incremental cost we can add the direct mail piece to the website as new and additional content.  This will boost natural SEO results.  We can also allow the promotional coupon to be live on the website for an extended duration, thereby increasing its shelf life.  And through all of these initiatives, we have the added value of web analytics to give us insight into who is actually receptive to our overtures, so we can do even better next time!

Now, imagine that you have multiple brands, each of which employ a wide range of traditional marketing tactics, and the messaging of those tactics varies by market.  The Interactive Marketing Roadmap will literally map out the alignment of traditional and web programs across all of these brands, assets and markets to create a uniform, comprehensive marketing and tactical strategic plan.  And we can create this plan in matter of weeks.  That enables the marketing department to get the benefit of this analysis for the duration of the year.  I consider that a prime example of “doing more with less.”  And Definition 6 is the only online ad agency to offer such a service.
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