We’ve always been critical of marketing spend on trade shows in this blog. Why go to a trade show?
*We’ve always gone to this trade show.
*It’s the industry’s biggest.
*Our competition will be there so we need a presence.
*Forget happy hour, how about happy week.
Trade shows are painful. They eat up tons of time before, during and after the show. Your team’s attention is diverted away from other projects that are much more likely to generate a better ROI and at the end of the day you have little to show for it save a full inbox and a week’s worth of playing catch up.
However, mobile marketing is the new hot topic in marketing this year. Mobile has the potential to meld the trade show floor with the digital space. Want to do some instant polling during a panel discussion? Done. Run a moderated SMS feed on the convention floor? No problem. Want to use Gowalla or Four Square to reward passersby that visit your booth? Yep.
The opportunities are fresh, new and inviting. Invest more of your time on mobile marketing, get a smaller booth and divert the remainder of your marketing spend to lead capture, nurture and conversion. We might just be experiencing the rebirth of the trade show (seminar, retreat, or training session).
I wish I could be even more specific, but I don’t know as much about our blog’s audience as I’d like. Nothing is more exciting than a deep, updated, quality database with demographic information down to the individual.
2. Be specific when building a microsite. Your target audience has the ability to bore themselves through your corporate website at leisure. Direct targeting should be more focused, personalized and engaging. Using a slick microsite you can engage prospects long enough to pitch just about anything. Unlike a corporate website, our microsite are quick to react to decisions the recipient makes. This gives you tactical advantage during the engagement.
Day three. John told Jill this was the most important boredom fighting decision he ever made. Jill agreed.
3. Personalize direct mail even a little bit goes a long way. Personalization is so readily available today that you shouldn’t send another non-personalized piece of mail again. It’s just too easy, too cheap and too effective to do otherwise. You’re more likely to drive web traffic with personalization and the web is where all marketing magic happens.
Our countdown of five ways you can fight boring B2B direct marketing continues with the most controversial of all suggestions.
4. Save your brand for the web. It is very tempting to slap your brand on everything from pens and pencils to towels and t-shirts, but the word is likely not quite as proud of that mark. You spent a lot of time and money to get the brand just so, but show restraint and keep the brand off your mail piece if you can. Mail gets higher negatives than a microsite, so don’t burn yourself with your own brand. Do you want your branded mail piece sitting in the trash can staring up at the recipient all day? Probably not.
Time and again it’s a good idea to take a step back for a refresher course in boredom fighting. Five years ago we made it our mantra. We still do it today. Here’s our top 5 ways to fight boring business to business direct marketing.
5. Send fewer mail pieces and don’t send metered mail. B2B marketers would do well to reduce the number of mailings, but spend the same. Reduce the mailing list, but spend the same you would for a larger list. Switching from metered to hand stamped increases the open rate. Culling the list reduces the number of returns you get and allows you to send a more polished dimensional mailer.
If you know anyone in the hospitality industry looking for a steal, boy do we have the hotel for you! Name your price.
For two years Crescent Bluffs has been the destination for weary marketers. It is just the place to relax, recharge and renew your commitment and passion for good, un-boring direct marketing.
However, for us, the honeymoon is over. We’re ready for new challenges and new adventure. We want to risk more, push the envelope and skirt the laws [hint, hint] that typically govern B2B direct marketing. We want to stay true to our mantra. We fight boredom!
Backstory: We broke ground in 2008 and opened Crescent Bluffs by invitation only in January 2009. Crescent Bluffs was a figment of our imagination, an internal marketing campaign meant to show our customers the power of intriguing, personalized marketing programs. Over the past 2 years we mailed over 26,000 people, had 20% of those visit the “hotel”. Seventy percent of respondents answered our questions and witnessed the brand reveal. Over the past 22 months the campaign generated a 705% return on investment even though 2009 was a terrible year for ad agencies. It is the bar by which we measure all campaigns built for our customers. It is a very high bar by industry standards, but we are anything but standard. Crescent Bluffs is a new genre, a fresh approach to direct marketing. We call it Dialog Marketing.
We mailed 26,000 people a hotel key and bar napkin. Fifty-two hundred visit our micro-site. Ten percent of those were and many still are VLG customers today. It’s quite a story. If you’d like a Dialog Marketing program please contact us today. 214.299.8688.
If you haven’t seen our GimmeKnucks.com campaign, please check it out and give us your feedback. This is more than a personality piece that gives the world a peak behind the VLG curtain. This is product research. We’re testing the market and testing the ROI on our marketing spend so you don’t have to experiment with your money.
Other ways to use video + personalized URLs:
* Informal interviews with key executives
* Customer testimonials
* Product demonstration
* Behind the scenes footage of daily life at your company…like ours
The cool thing about video is it shares the same portability as PURL-driven micro-sites. When combined the two give you one-to-one intel so you can turn your time and attention (and money) toward your best customers and prospects.
We also like the Clapping Song, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah and just about any song that gets stuck in your head for days at a time. They’ll haunt you, but in a good way. Unless, like me, your family trip to Disneyland took a turn for the worse when we got stuck in the “It’s a Small World” ride for an hour–in Japan.
Kotoba wa minna chigatte mo,
Minna no kokoro wa onaji,
Katakumi atte mirai e arukô,
Chiisa na sekai.
There is nothing of the sort in these two videos. Enjoy!
The video that started it all.
The best response video.
Where’s your favorite fist bumping, knucks vid on YouTube?
The last five years are a blur. One day you’re sitting around looking at how B2B marketing managers struggle to engage their channel partners, customers, prospects and internal audiences. Ping! The light bulb goes off. I’m not sure light bulbs “ping,” but you get the point. We came up with a solution that’s both old school and new…school.
What we call Dialog Marketing, that special blend of guerilla mail and kick butt online engagement, has infotained hundreds of thousands of targeted individuals. (See what we did there. We combined information and entertainment to form cheesy a verb–classic.)
But seriously…seriously, we can only measure our success over the years by the company we keep. Our thanks to the 100+ companies we’ve had the opportunity to work with over the past 5 years. We hit this milestone only because you trusted us with your budget, goals and your time. Many of you are much more than customers, but people we truly consider our friends.
There is something unattractive about the name Xefer. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’d love to hear the story of how that came about. Regardless, for visual thinkers and blog subscribers we’d recommend taking a look at your Tweets with one of Xefer’s unique projects. Here’s the output for @wefightboredom.
The hotspots tell a story. We clearly believe Tuesday is the best day for sharing good content. Some of this is scheduled Tweets, but others seem to be when those we follow put up good, re-tweetable content. We’re exploring ways to analyze our content and tweak our tweets for added value and success. This tool will help paint the picture. Check it out when you get a chance.
