Spring Is Here: Don't Miss an Opportunity to Cross-Pollinate Your Programs

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		March 2009, Issue 61

Featured Article
Spring Is Here: Don't Miss an Opportunity to Cross-Pollinate Your Programs
By Ahmed Taleb, Senior Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions

Building an effective promotion roadmap for online marketing is not a simple task, but it's both necessary and important. The goal is to create a cohesive and deliberate series of interaction points that add value to your prospects' experience and lead to ever-increasing levels of engagement. Think of it as the polar opposite of "one and done."

This excerpt from the new white paper, "Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar by Making Every Channel Count," reviews the first of three exercises designed to help create an integrated promotion roadmap for online marketing activities: Capture and scrutinize your existing marketing calendar to identify opportunities to stretch your brand conversation and identify specific conversion points in your marketing program.

Taking Stock of Your Existing Program

This article is an excerpt. Want to read the whole thing?
Ahmed's complete white paper, "Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar by Making Every Channel Count," is now available for download.

Get your complimentary copy today, and learn about the other two exercises that will help you create an integrated promotion roadmap for your online marketing activities.

If your organization is like most, you already have many ongoing initiatives in your marketing program: Webinars, e-mail campaigns, virtual (and in-person) trade shows and the like. Before approaching the development of specific calls to action to lead to increasing levels of engagement, you need to identify where opportunities exist in your current programs to build integration and cross-promote prospect traffic.

The logical place to start is with your marketing calendar. Within the typical BtoB marketing calendar, there are often gaps between parallel programs that have no deliberate points of integration. These programs are operating as disconnected entities. Regardless of whether these are the result of organizational structures or intentional team alignment, they represent missed opportunities to cross-pollinate.

Make It Visual

Begin by capturing your marketing calendar in a dynamic visual format and walking through each component with your marketing team to understand its overall value to your program. What are the goals? What are the metrics by which success is measured? For each marketing vehicle—Webinar, trade show, e-mail campaign—clearly identify an owner as well as any requirements specific to its use. This will help you understand where cross-promotion opportunities exist.

Next Step: CTAs

Once you have a strong understanding of your current initiatives, you can identify simple calls to action that can be leveraged to extend the conversation across channels and drive your prospects to conversion points. These calls to action may take the form of lower-value opt-in opportunities or higher-value offers such as surveys and assessments.

For example, an organization that maintains a strong physical event presence, attending many trade shows, will capture many prospects to their marketing program through face-to-face contact at their booth. A prospect that discovers an organization in this high-value environment may only take advantage of a call to action that drives to an offering of similar or higher value. This may come in the form of a product trial or download, or even an invitation to a future, exclusive event. On the other hand, lower touch marketing activities such as e-mail or Web site impressions may require a less sophisticated and resource-intensive effort to engage prospects with calls to action, because the expectations are different.

The objective is to leverage these activities that are already under way to build synergies across your program as a whole. Remember to be pragmatic. You're trying to extend the effectiveness of your current program rather than re-architect a new one.

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Ahmed Taleb is director of strategic planning at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and management company. Visit www.bulldogsolutions.com to learn more.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing.