I built my launch schedule in EXCEL. I’m sure it could exist in several other formats as well. Here’s a snapshot of the first few weeks. As you can see the LinkedIn status is changed to alert the connections announcing the 101 Ways to Generating a Truckload of Targeted Leads eBook on November 11th. Those recipients in the address book receive a similar announcement in an email. Tweets go out all week. Remember, people are not listening to their Twitter stream all day hence the repeated messages on different days at various times.
Week two takes a slightly different tact. The marketing focus switches to announcing the free bi-weekly newsletter marketingSNACKS. The announcement goes out to four groups or audiences the LinkedIn connections, those in the address book, plus the Twitter followers and the blog readership. The announcements go out on Wednesday. People are usually the busiest on Mondays and Fridays.
So far you can see that we have developed our marketing launch to involve four different audiences being offered two different marketing pieces the eBook and the newsletter. Most people will likely opt for one or the other a few will take both offers.
The strategy here is that some people will want more information while others will be satisfied with less. The goal of any marketing campaign is to hit the right chord to uncover what interests people most.
Here’s a look at Week 6:
As you can see the marketing campaign is turning into a well-oiled machine.
As our 90-day Marketing Plan develops we’ll add two more audiences those that visit the company website and those that will receive a direct mail piece.
For those visitors to the website, the marketing effort will include two strategically placed ads one for the eBook and one for the newsletter. Those interested will be directed to separate landing pages so we can track their involvement.
As long as we have our marketing plan humming along on the Internet why not try a piece of street mail to see if we can garner any enthusiasm.
Here’s how we when about identifying potential prospects. First we made a trip to the local library. Okay, we could have called by phone but we wanted to start building a relationship with the person that compiles all the business references. Once there we looked into the different business listings that were available and compiled a list of 150 potential companies that fit the characteristics of our ideal client. We’d like to end up with 100 good names so we took more than we needed because invariably some companies will fall off our list for one reason or another.
The next task was to write a great introductory letter. Ours included a few shocking quotes to catch their attention followed by a problem, our solution and the benefits they would derive from using our approach. The letter closed with a short intro of who we are and a mention that we would be following up in a few days to make sure the letter reached their desk and to answer any unanswered questions they might have about what was said.
The letters will be sent out in batches of 10. Ten calls are all we can follow up with and still keep working on current projects.
To close let’s remember that launching the marketing campaign whatever it looks like and sticking to that commitment is what matters most. We won’t learn as much if we just run the campaign for a few weeks and then move on to the next shinny object.
