The Alpha and Omega of Modern Marketing

Before launching any multi-channel marketing campaign or jumping headfirst into social media marketing, you need to begin with a great website. In many cases, your website will be the first contact your customers have with your brand and the last contact they have before making a purchase.

Your website is the first solid contact that people have when they become prospects for your product and service. Whether they find you through a search engine or see one of your display ads, as soon as they become seriously interested, they will find your website to learn more about you. If you are a web retailer, your website is also the final step in their purchase process. However, even brick and mortar retailers have customers who use the web to do price comparisons, find store locations and check on store hours before coming into the store.

First impressions are important on the web. Your site needs to appeal to the type of customers that buy your product. The graphics and messaging need to pull people in and get them excited about your product and service. The navigation system should be balanced to help people find the right product with the minimum number of clicks.

If you want people to come back to your page regularly, the content needs to be frequently updated. A blog that covers topics that interest your customers is one of the best ways to keep people engaged with your site. The blog should be updated at least one per week and should not be used as a sales platform for the company's products. When you create a new blog post, be sure to mention it and provide links on all of your social media feeds.

Accessibility is extremely important. As more of your audience are shopping using smartphones and tablets, sites that don’t have mobile versions will get left behind. Avoiding Flash plugins is essential since iPhone and iPad users are not able to view them.

The final step is to make your website easily sharable. In addition to the buttons that allow people to find your pages on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites, include buttons that allow people to share your content on their own feeds. And always make it very clear how people can subscribe to your content using an RSS reader or email.

Is your website all that it should be?

Multi-Channel Step by Step

Double Thick Impact Card by Convertible Solutions

Multi-channel marketing is one of the hottest topics in the printing industry. Marketers and printers have discovered that combining direct mail with electronic media produces better results than either do individually. Smart printers are leveraging this knowledge to drive printing sales and promote their marketing services departments.

A successful multi-channel campaign can be conducted in many ways. This posts outlines some of the steps that can be used to introduce a new product or concept.

1.  Seed Interest - Weeks or months before the introduction, start including links to articles that would be interesting to prospects in your social media feeds. This works particularly well in Twitter where the interesting articles are likely to be posted originally by potential prospects. Retweeting those posts can help you build a relationship with those prospects long before the product announcement.

2. Perfect Your Website - When you are ready to launch, make sure that your website is attractive, current and the product is easy to find and well explained. The prospect who visits your website needs to be persuaded to purchase and has to know how to purchase your product.

3.  Create a Compelling Mail Piece - Direct mail is one of the least filtered ways to reach your prospects. You need to create something that has visual and tactile impact so your customer stops and examines it as soon as they touch it. Convertible Solution’s Double Thick Impact Cards can help provide the tactile impact. Once the prospect is compelled to look at the piece, the graphics and the offer have to compel action.

4. Personalized Landing Pages - Include personalized URLs on your mailing that link to personalized landing pages. For example, www.David.Williams.Double-Thick.com* would link to a page that welcomes me by name, explains the offer concisely and allows me to respond to the offer by simply checking a box. The personalized landing pages simplify the response process for the prospect and provide tracking information to the marketer.

5. Mobile Website - Personalized QR codes can be included on the mailing that take people directly to their landing page when they scan the code with their smart phone or tablet. Non-personalized QR codes can be included on trade show signs, brochures and point-of-sale materials. Make sure that QR codes always direct people to a site that is designed to present the information clearly on a mobile screen.

6. Triggered Email - The software that creates the personalized URLs can also send emails based upon how people have responded.  A thank you email should be send to anyone who visits the site and responds to the offer and reminder emails can be sent at intervals to those who have not yet responded. The graphics and message in these triggered emails should stimulate the prospect’s memory of the original mailing.

7. Press Release - At the time of the launch, send a well drafted press release to the editors of the publications that serve your industry and post the release on a news service like PR Web or PR Wire. Be sure to also post it in the news section of your own web site. The release should include links to the product on your web site.

8. Social Media Sharing - Post links to the news story on your web site to your social media feeds. Be sure to express your appreciation to any followers who retweet or share your news and join in on the conversation. If anyone blogs about your product or creates any other original content about it, be sure to include links to those posts as well.

These are a few steps that can be used in the creation of a multi-channel marketing campaign. If you include video, pay per click, television or radio, make sure those messages also tie in with your print and web approach.

Have you completed a multi-channel campaign?  How did it go?

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 *This link is no longer attached to a personalized landing page.