Posts Tagged ‘YourCover.com’
Our agency being on the smaller side has the ability to be nimble while at the same time employing new marketing tools in real time for our own www.YourCover.com product as well as for our clients.
Because budgets can be tight we’ve learned a great deal on how to maximize efficiencies and take a guerilla marketing approach to particular projects. But what exactly does the term ‘guerilla’ marketing mean? It seems to mean different things to different people.
Thanks to Wikipedia the definition of guerilla marketing is: ‘an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing campaigns are unexpected and unconventional; potentially interactive; and consumers are targeted in unexpected places. The objective of guerrilla marketing is to create a unique, engaging and thought-provoking concept to generate buzz, and consequently turn viral. The term was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing. I don’t know why he spells it with two ‘r’s.
That sounds all fine and good, but too many people equate guerilla marketing with – you don’t have to spend any money. I don’t believe Jay Conrad Levinson had that thought in mind. Then there’s also the notion that somehow when guerilla marketing strategies and tactics are employed we agency types will be smarter and more cost-conscious. My point is that ALL marketers should always be trying to do things smarter and more cost-consciously on every project.
For example, building a Facebook ‘website’ type page within Facebook is something different that might fall into the guerilla marketing category – it’s unconventional (at least for now), has a potential reach of 500 million Facebook users and is decidedly a less expensive proposition than a conventional website. But even with that less expensive approach than that of a conventional website, it’s far from free or even a nominal expenditure. Strategy, concept, and execution on the part of the agency are what we get paid to do.
We like and ascribe to the idea of unconventional approaches but there also are times when we know a big fat branding and marketing campaign will be the best way for a client to achieve their marketing objectives. We feel that way about YourCover all the time but lack the resources to blow out a big time brand message so we continue to grow the company using a myriad of what we consider to be affordable tactics and channels. So yes we are employing guerilla marketing when we know we’d be better off if we could employ gorilla marketing!
I’d love to hear about some of the unconventional approaches you’ve encountered out there. Please share your stories and we can all learn a little more.
Email remains a relevant and workable platform when communicating with customers and interested prospects. I continue to feel that email as a customer acquisition tool is a difficult road at best.
Our agency helps craft email messages for our clients. The method of distribution comes up frequently. The leading commercial email provider is Constant Contact (CC). There are others like Strongmail, Goodmail, Silverpop and many more. CC is a solid platform that is relatively inexpensive with somewhat limited functionality. But it’s cheap. Did I mention that? When we recommend email distribution (and we have our own proprietary platform) we sometimes recommend NOT using our own solution. This has mostly to do with individual client budget limitations.
If you are sending 500 emails, or even 2,500 a platform like Constant Contact offers a simple interface, a few templates and a decent reporting system. Once you step up to higher quantities it makes more sense to consider a platform that has more features, better reporting and unlimited graphical opportunities.
Most of the commercial email platforms like CC have their own ‘advertisement’ at the bottom of the email. If you are a corporation connecting with your clients and prospects that’s not necessarily the most professional look and feel. And once you are sending out thousands of email at a time the expense factor levels out and a proprietary system can actually be less expensive as the numbers get larger.
And what about substantially expanded creative capability? Our www.YourCover.com product had used CC for years and we were frustrated by the limitations set forth by the platform itself. We simply could not maintain our brand image using the CC interface. And as our email list has grown the cost savings has become less evident. So we are moving over to our own platform (finally) since our list is both large enough and we cannot put up with the graphic limitations of CC.
Why a proprietary system over one out of the can? It’s all about integration. The ability to send emails, surveys, Purls, direct to landing pages and even print on demand off of one engine makes our lives (and our client’s lives) so much easier AND so much better in terms of reporting and metrics. And last time I checked making things easier and better was still important.
Or at least I think so.