Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published  August 3, 2007 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Over the years I’ve noticed that B2B marketing programs tend to revolve around a single tactic. An ad campaign. A direct mail campaign. An email campaign.

If you or your marketing people are still looking at a single marketing tactic as a “campaign”, you have an opportunity get a lot more mileage out of your marketing dollars simply by changing the way you think of a campaign.

To me, a marketing campaign includes all of the tactics and other elements necessary to find and engage prospects, and develop them into sales opportunities. The expectation is that money and other resources spent on the campaign will result in more potential customers who are ready to talk to a sales person. Not just more names.

In the high ticket, complex sale arena, I’ve never seen an ad, a direct mail piece, or an email message that could accomplish all of that alone. No matter how good the copywriter and/or graphic designer might be.

When we develop a marketing campaign for our clients, we begin by asking a series of questions to make sure we consider all of the essential components.

Here are some good ones to help you in developing your own marketing campaigns. The first six are relatively common in developing good direct marketing programs. The last four will make the real difference.

1. Who is the target audience?
2. Where can we find them?
3. What do we want them to do?
4. What can we offer that will be of great enough value to them to do what we want them to do?
5. How many different ways will we make the offer?
6. How many chances will we give the prospects to respond?
7. What will we do after prospects accept the offer?
8. How many different offers will we need to make in order to get an acceptable number of prospects to become qualified leads?
9. When will we know a prospect is ready to be passed to the sales team?
10. How many sales-ready prospects do we need to generate to a) justify the campaign, and b) consider it a success.

Without addressing all of these questions, a “campaign” is really just a tactic. It may begin the marketing process, but it won’t consistently deliver qualified leads.