Marketing Guide Part 3 of 4: Launching Marketing Campaigns

Hopefully, you aren't joining us mid-conversation, but if you are, make sure you get caught up first by reading our blogs "Marketing Guide Part 1 of 4: Your Marketing Budget" and "Marketing Guide Part 2 of 4: The Bare Essentials" before continuing on.

Once you’ve established the infrastructure for your marketing, it’s time to get more aggressive and get in front of some new prospects. In this post, we’re going to talk about what should go into a campaign to market managed IT services to local businesses.

Establish and Vet Your List

In the first blog of this Marketing series, we discussed the importance of starting a lead list and keeping it organized. You should try to touch your leads regularly with emails if you have permission, direct mail if you don’t, and phone calls.

If you’ve been doing this over time, that’s great! You are ready to move to the next step. If not, it’s time to get a lead list.

There are a lot of ways to get a lead list; your chamber of commerce might provide one or let you pay to access it, peer groups and trade shows are good sources as well, provided that you attend them. You can also purchase lists of contacts.

BEWARE: Purchasing contact lists can be a bit of a gamble unless you are willing to take the time to properly vet and prune the list before your campaign begins!

Before we pay a single cent, we painstakingly vet and research each lead we think we want. These lists often contain records that are outdated or inaccurate so it takes some time on Google and LinkedIn to verify the data and make sure they are a fit. Otherwise, you’ll be sending mailers out to leads that might not even be a fit for you.

Get the Campaign Pieces Together

Depending on the type of campaign you are running, this is going to vary, but for the sake of example, let’s assume we’re running a campaign to small businesses that we either have no relationship with whatsoever or maybe we’ve only done a business with in the past. Either way, these are practically frozen leads that we’re going to start to touch.

We don’t have emails for most of our contacts, nor do we have permission to email them anyway since we just purchased most of the contacts for our lead list. The plan is to push the campaign out to 50 contacts at a time.

Here are some ideas of items you can use for your campaign:

• A deliverable that would interest the audience, or an enticing offer
• A landing page offering that deliverable or offer
• Branded letters and envelopes introduce yourself and encourage the reader to check out the deliverable or your offer. Subsequent letters should provide a little extra value on their own
• Oversized postcards driving recipients to the landing page
• Emails to send to users who sign up for the deliverable or the offer
• Social Media ads

Since we’re starting with a list of people who don’t know who we are, we need to approach this gently and offer a lot of valuable material as opposed to hard sales copy. Fortunately, a lot of what gets built can be used again in a future campaign.

Launch Your Marketing Campaign

Once you have your list and your pieces, it’s time to launch.

We strongly suggest thoroughly testing everything before anything hits the mail or social media. It would be a shame to run through the entire campaign to find out the landing page form wasn’t tested.

Even if a new lead doesn’t pan into an actual sales opportunity, as long as they opt in, you can start to email them newsletters, email blasts, and other marketing promotions. They might not have an immediate need for you, but it’s best to keep touching them until they do.

This basically cycles us back to our previous post about your bare-minimum marketing infrastructure and how you need it humming along in the background. You’ll want to keep touching these leads through that to keep your business top of mind.

Make Adjustments and Repeat

Congratulations! By this point, you should have gotten yourself in front of 50 new contacts! When a campaign like this is done right, we typically see at least a couple of appointments come out of it. 

It’s time to run the campaign with a new list of 50 vetted contacts.

And then again. And again. You get the idea. You tweak as you go, but you don’t give up!

How to Plan and Justify the Cost of Marketing

By now, you are probably wondering how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to running campaigns like this, and how to justify the time and effort spent on marketing. In our next post, we’re going to break everything down based on the time it typically takes to do all of this work, and how much success aggressive marketing like this needs to have to give your business a solid return on investment.

Back to Part 2