Campaign Countdown
Launching a marketing campaign successfully is all in the timing. Here’s how to go from better late than never to never late and great
by Tim Bostwick | Published in February 2008 Focus on Marketing
Time is the enemy with events. Like the clock in every frenzied 24 hours of Jack Bauer’s life, your event clock is also counting down, down, down. Ready or not, your event will occur — whether you have a lot of attendees or zero, those doors will open.
When developing and implementing a marketing plan, of course it’s important to include in your campaign a combination of direct mail, e-mail broadcasting and telemarketing. But even more important than the exact media mix you choose? The timing.
It’s critical to stick to your schedule so that the great ideas you’ve developed come to fruition. Your audience can be well chosen and the media used integrated and effective, but if you don’t stay on schedule, the overall campaign will be ineffective.
Lost Time Can’t Be Recovered
There’s no polite way to say this: When it comes to marketing a conference, execution is everything. You must stay on schedule or your marketing effort will fail.
First of all, marketing tools “degrade” with time. A marketing piece sent a month from now is worth less than a marketing piece sent today. For example, it takes 30 to 60 days for a prospective attendee to get approval to attend an event and process a purchase order through the corporate labyrinth. If your advance program arrives late, prospective attendees won’t have time to react, no matter how psyched they are to attend.
Second, as discussed in my previous article, “Attending to Attendance,” which ran in the December 2007 issue, each item in your media mix needs to reinforce the other elements. Since this process is all about timing, missing one deadline throws the entire campaign off track.
Charting Success
It is essential, then, to develop tools to stay on schedule. One of the tools I recommend is the graphical or chart-style marketing tool. At our company, we sometimes use the spreadsheet (or “milestone”) method for general project management, but when it comes to managing a marketing campaign, a chart distills a great deal of data into a visual product.
The chart method offers three main benefits:
- A chart clearly shows the interaction of the various marketing media and how each reinforces the others.
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For example, in the chart on pg. 40, you’ll notice that the advance program (AP) drops the week of 1/12 (11 weeks out) and telereminding starts the week after. The effectiveness of the phone follow-up will be greatly enhanced if prospects have already seen the AP.
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Right after the phone follow-up, there’s an e-mail broadcast on keynotes; this e-mail is much more likely to be read coming on the heels of a phone call. You can see how all media work separately but they also work together.
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It’s critical to maintain a sense of urgency throughout the campaign. Seeing the entire marketing plan on one sheet of paper destroys the illusion that you have unlimited time and that missing a deadline here and there won’t matter.
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In weightlifting, there’s a concept called “cheating” when you do 19 reps instead of the 20 you committed to. The question becomes, “What’s one missed rep?” The answer is that one missed marketing “rep” leads to another, and before you know it, your AP arrives too late for people to respond.
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Another common attitude is, “Look how much time we have. Missing a deadline now won’t kill us later.” This is an illusion. Our (sometimes painful) experience has been that you should be fighting to stay on deadline in September just as hard as in March. If you’re faithful to your plan, it will be faithful to you.
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A chart device helps you view activities in groups while still keeping each item in sequence. The color-coded column format makes this process easier. For example, you can quickly look down the mail column and plan your entire mail campaign as a single entity, messaging each mail piece as if it stood alone.
One helpful exercise is to ask yourself, “What if my entire campaign was just direct mail? What would I say and when would I say it?” To paraphrase the first point above, the media work together but they also work separately. Mail provides detail. E-mail packs a punch. Telemarketing is the nag. The website is open for business 24/7, the first and last word on everything.
Track Attendance Goals
Measuring the effectiveness of the campaign as you go along is crucial. Keep detailed year-to-date reports so you can compare this year to last year, and also start a database to use in future years.
Keep in mind that the event date changes each year, so a straight calendar comparison won’t work. The chart above uses the “Weeks Out” method, and your tracking should also. For example, if last year’s event was in April and so is this year’s, remember that the two dates may be several weeks apart and so your “weeks out” measurement is actually quite different. Adjust the campaign according to results.
The chart above looks rigid — and it is intended to lock in activities and deadlines. But we all know that plans sometimes need to change. Attendance may lag and you need to beef up the campaign. This chart format will help you make the necessary adjustments and still maintain marketing reinforcement while you stay on schedule.
Editor’s Note: This is the third and final part of a series on designing an effective marketing campaign. See the previous articles in the Sept. and Dec. 2007 issues of the magazine or on event-solutions.com.
About the author: Tim Bostwick
Tim Bostwick is an executive vice president with AMI, a conference management firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Contact: tim@amotive.com