Strategy means many things to many people. For some, its about the activities that are engineered for the audience to participate in. For others, its bringing the brand to life online. For others still, its about the right events or digital activities to participate in. I submit it’s all of these things and more.

Creating or adopting a strategic framework for the needs of your experience or program is a good place to start. From there, taking time to think about how you will approach each component lays the foundation for success. Here are some tips for creating a strategic framework that will help you rally the troops and march onward toward victory.

1. Clearly articulate and prioritize all objectives. What are you trying to accomplish with the event / experience / program? If you accomplish only one thing, what must it be? Because there are many lieutenants in the work we do, there are also many opinions on what the objectives should be. Try to foster agreement on as few objectives as possible. Honing the list down to no more than 1-3 objectives will ensure your squad focuses on the right things.

2. Think about measurement first. Now that you’ve established your objectives, it’s important to understand if, when and how you’ve accomplished them. Create a measurement strategy that reports on how these objectives are being met. no more, no less. Make sure all officers and troops alike are in agreement on success imperative and the measurement plan before the event / experience / program is launched.

3. Know how your battle contributes to the war effort. Always understand the input and outputs of what you’re doing. What other programs might influence your work? What contribution does your event make to the campaign? Understanding will also help ensure your are focused on the most important things.

4. Take time to get to know the target. Think beyond the demographics and psychographics of audiences. What are their interests? What are their triggers and inhibitors? What emotional and rational needs do they have that your brand can fulfill? This will lay the foundation for relevent experiences and build meaningful relationships.

5. Play to your strengths. Know thyself. Stay on brand and execute those tactics which are most likely to succeed. Apply the 80 / 20 rule for experimental activities and focus on tried and true methods first. Also know your weaknesses and be prepared to overcom them.

6. Survey the battlefield. What else is happening in the marketplace? What are your competitors up to? What socio-economic factors, marketing trends, business challenges, online and offline influencers need to be considered? Knowing the environment in which you are operating can help determine the types of activities executed at right time and place to maximize success.

7. Draft a comprehensive plan of attack. How will you attract an audience? What experiences will motivate them to act on your objectives? How are you representing your brand? What’s the sales strategy? What about follow-up? Promotions? Ensure there are sub strategies to your overarching strategy.

8. Develop contingencies for defeat and victory. Flexibility is key. Know what you will do if all or part of your program begins to fail before the event / experience / program is executed. Alternatively, know what you will do if the work is wildly successful. Sometimes an inability to support success can be more damaging than an outright failure. Make sure you have immediate, quick-strike plans in place as well as intermediate and longer-term ideas in your arsenal.

9. Remember measurement. Measure and diagnose your event / experience / program. Understand success, the degrees to whiich you were successful, and the reasons behind success or failure. Consider what successful tactics can be replicated elsewhere or improved apon. What were the reasons for failure? How can this be prevented next time? Create a plan for continuous improvement so each battle is won with fewer casualties.

Sun Tzu also wrote, “The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” By creating a strategy and calculating the outcomes before you launch your plan, you’ll be able to mitigate failure and drive overwhelming success.

The Art of Experiential Marketing is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

There’s an old adage that states: “Quality, cost, delivery: pick any two.” This means there is a direct relationship between each of these, and businesses can only expect to have a positive outcome of two of the three at any given time. For example, higher quality and delivery speed will increase cost, or lower cost and increased delivery speed will reduce quality, etc.

Experiential marketing has evolved to include face-to-face, virtual, social and other digital marketing tactics as part of a 360 degree relationship between brands and their audiences. With that evolution, how are marketers managing the QCD triangle? In this post, I’ll examine the impact this evolution has made and share some ideas on improving and balancing quality, cost and delivery.

Quality: In a face-to-face environment, this is something we’ve strived for for decades. From speakers, to staff training, to signage and fit and finish of our booth or retail environment, many marketers may feel as if they’ve nailed this one. But what happens when you introduce quality of audience interaction? If you were to survey attendees of your experience, what would they say about the quality of conversation and relationship with your company and your brand? This becomes even more difficult with the advent of virtual events and social media. Platform developers are working feverishly to create the latest and greatest buzz-worthy tools to improve and enhance their virtual and social experiences. At the end of they day, however, it’s not about the platform or the tools, it’s about the engagement and interaction between brands and audiences. I’ve observed many brands who’ve done an adequate job of signposting around the social web, but few engage effectively.

How to improve this? Focus at least as much energy on listening as your brand does on speaking. Engage your audiences in conversations, regardless of tool or platform. Offer true value for your audiences with every engagement. To be relevant to your audiences, you must do relevant things. Also remember that frequency of interaction matters. Too much is just as damaging as too little, but in different ways.

Cost: The albatross of marketers. Everything is just so damn expensive. Marketers have applied procurement, process and penny-pinching to their programs with limited success. Taking a programatic approach via portfolio planning has helped many achieve balance. Virtual events and social media have certainly helped drive the cost of audience engagement down, but at what price? While digital experiences are indeed less expensive, the quality of engagement is far lower than a face-to-face experience. This is not to say virtual and social activities have no value, but should be applied as part of an overall plan to balance out the communications stream with your audiences. Bear in mind hidden costs are everywhere. For example, a virtual event will save on expenses like travel, shipping, drayage, etc, but building a quality experience online can be costly. Also, qualified audiences can be more difficult to attract to virtual events, which is another cost driver.

How to improve this? Understand what the marketing purpose is for each tactic in your portfolio. Apply the right activities for each stage of the pipeline. Monitor and diagnose performance of each and understand the performance relationship between each tactic and it’s contribution to the whole. Deselect or adjust activities which are under-performers and reinvest in those tactics which are driving success. Otherwise, continue to drive down costs using the traditional process, procurement and penny-pinching approach you’ve come to know and love.

Delivery: Through ‘just-in-time’ logisitics, global creative capabilities, streamlined fabrication and decentralized production processes, the speed at which a face-to-face event or experience can be delivered is mind-boggling. The same holds true for virtual experiences with digital sweatshops and pre-packaged “off-the-shelf” digital environments. Often these speedy solutions are of adequate quality, but who wants to be “adequate”? Cost however is a key issue when it comes to speedy delivery. Just because you can develop an experience quickly, doesn’t mean you should.

How to improve this? Sure, having quick-strike weapons in your arsenal which can be deployed as part of a flexible go-to-market strategy is a great idea, but tread carefully. Often marketers look to deploy something quickly when something else is failing. When planning your campaigns, make sure you focus on strategy first, and build a contingency plan for all major foreseeable circumstances, both positive and negative. What about a quick-strike plan that capitalizes on successful implementation, and not just when the world is crashing down around your very expensive campaign that is failing to draw an audience?

I would add just one more, Quantity. This is a holy grail of sorts for marketers. What is the right number, frequency, cadence and type of marketing activities required to meet a desired result? Too often marketers assume their audiences live their lives by a media plan. Now more than ever the way an audience experiences a brand is well out of control of the most well-intended marketer.

How to improve this? Test, test, and when you’re done, test again. Audiences are largely unpredictable. Draw a line in the sand and create a marketing mix that is strategically designed to meet your objectives and address your audiences where they live, work and play, both online and offline. Measure the results against your objectives and change it up, often, too see what works best.

Pick Any Two is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

The most significant takeaway: The definition of a lead varies by company, business model, industry, approach and audience.

All said, here are some thoughts to help you ensure your definition, data collection and pipeline management process are aligned for maximum effectiveness.

1. Determine the minimum information required. Typically we need a name and some contact information:

• Name
• Address
• City
• State
• Postal Code
• Country
• Telephone
• Mobile Phone
• Email
• Social Media

Minimum is important. You want to make sure it is as easy as possible for your target audiences to provide information. Also think in terms of communications platforms. How does your audience prefer to be communicated to? Email? Direct Mail? Telephone? SMS? What about connecting via Social Media? (Now there’s an idea! However, I’m not sure if we will get to the point of: “Please check here if we can ‘friend’ you on Facebook.” By the way, does a Twitter ‘follow’ constitute as an Opt-In?) Think about how your organization typically communicates as well, within the current marketing campaign, by your sales teams, customer service and beyond. There are also advantages and disadvantages to each communications channel. Think about the differences between interactivity, engagement, interruptive vs. collaborative, one-way vs. two way, static vs. dynamic, etc. The platform you choose determines the contact information you need, and says something about your brand and customers as well.

2. “Opt-In” is not just the law, it is a strategic weapon. Think carefully about how you want your audiences to participate. There are several types of Opt-Ins:

• Specific Marketing Campaign
• General Company
• Specific Product or Service
• Partner Offers

Interestingly, how you present Opt-In questions is just as important as what types of Opt-In questions you choose. Studies have shown this is a balance between quantity and quality of leads. Negatively-framed questions (Opt-Outs) receive higher participation rates than positively-framed questions (Opt-Ins). Pre-selected choices also receive higher Opt-In rates, however the quality of these leads tends to be lower than those where participants are required to select the option. Copy treatments and page positioning have also been shown to effect participation quantity and quality.

3. BANT Qualification has two inherent strengths. BANT Qualification, or understanding a prospects Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (hence the BANT acronym) assists you in understanding whether or not a prospect is a viable customer. For example, a prospect’s budget is too low for your product or service, or they don’t have the authority to make the purchase decision. It can also help your sales teams in prioritizing leads. Should a prospect be looking to purchase a product or service in the near-term (Timeframe) of have more than enough Budget to purchase your offering(s), they could be considered a ‘hot’ lead.

So how do you get BANT information? Here, you have some choices. You can either address BANT with your marketing approach, leave it to your sales teams or adopt a hybrid model. Here are some examples:

• Budget: (formulaic) “What is your annual household income?”, (direct) “What is your company’s annual budget for X?”
• Authority: “Are you Head of Household?”, “Are you the final decision maker or do you recommend or influence purchase decisions for your company?”
• Need: “Do you own a home?”, “Does your company outsource your IT?’
• Timeframe: “When are you looking to purchase a new car?”, “When does your company’s fiscal calendar end?”

As you can see, these types of questions can be asked through a marketing campaign, as part of an initial sales or outreach (telemarketing) campaign, or across both.

4. Conditioning leads is good or you and good for them. Conditioning leads is the art and science of collecting additional demographic, psychographic and technographic information from your audience, while educating them about your brand and products. Conditioning allows brands to learn more about their audiences, and their audiences to learn more about them. It’s a courtship of sorts that will (hopefully) lead to a long-term relationship. Think about what additional information you’d like to collect about your audiences over time. This can inform your current pipeline, futures sales and marketing efforts, and provide some incredible opportunities for your customer service organization to drive retention, expansion, loyalty and advocacy.

Think of conditioning questions as the “nice-to-know” information about your audiences. This information, while not required for the sales process might help hone your future marketing efforts or give your sales teams an edge in establishing and building relationships with prospects. Some examples: “Do they participate in social media?” “What publications do they read?” “How many people are in their family?”

Similarly, understanding what additional pieces of information your audiences would like to, and need to know about your products or brand can help optimize your marketing, sales and service efforts. Here we include what audiences “need-to-know” about our brands and products in order to make a purchase decision, as well as the “nice-to-know” information that may drive audiences from the consideration to preference stages of the pipeline. “Does your organization align to your audiences moral and ethical compass?”, “Is your brand fun and playful, or more serious and straightforward?”, “How engaging and personal is your company?” Every communication with your audiences should tell a part of the story. People do business with brands they know, like and trust. Frequency and cadence of communications is important here. Understanding the balance between too much, too often and just right takes time and practice.

You can also use the conditioning process as a strategic tool to control the speed at which prospects move through the sales cycle. For example: for complex products or solutions, more conditioning may lower return rates and increase overall customer satisfaction. Or, if you have a smaller sales staff and a marketing campaign is wildly successful, conditioning can be used to keep prospects in a holding pattern until your sales teams can address them.

All said, capturing and qualifying leads can be a far more complex process than “name, address and phone number”. If you adopt a strategic approach to your lead process that is aligned to your sales, marketing and service efforts, you can manage your pipeline with great effectiveness and efficiency, build stronger and deeper relationships with your customers and drive long-term business success. Think beyond the lead.

Do you have any thoughts on defining a lead or managing the process? Please share!

Demand Generation: The Anatomy Of A Lead is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

Here are 10 thoughts on how you can create an effective and efficient event portfolio plan.

1. Collaborate: Ensure you have all the right people involved in the process: brands and business units; corporate headquarters and countries or regional offices; event marketers, advertisers, direct marketers, digital teams, PR and sales; agencies; business partners, etc. Having the right people involved at the right level from the beginning of the process with help you build an integrated plan that has a much higher probability of success. This will also facilitate buy-in and help things work much more smoothly as the year goes on.

2. Build Value: Relationships are predicated upon a mutual exchange of value. Remember this when working with your internal and external teams during the planning process. Understanding the inputs, outputs and roles of each and every team member will help make the process run effectively and efficiently. Respect for individual roles and establishing an environment of trust are critical. Success of the plan, and ultimately the company trumps individual needs.

3. Think of the Audience First: People do not live their lives via a media plan or event schedule. Most will only attend a few events per year. Who are your target audiences and what events are they most likely to attend? Event marketing portfolios should be built from an audience perspective first.

4. Give Every Event A Job: Some events and tactics are good for generating awareness and thought leadership. Others are better for lead generation.  Still others have strengths in nurturing and closing the deal. Don’t forget about loyalty events. While its true that few events have a singular purpose, consider the promary objective of each event in your portfolio, and ensure you have the right tactics in place at every stage in the sales cycle. Remember that large third-party events are best for the early stages of the cycle (awareness, lead generation) and smaller, proprietary engagements are most appropriate toward the end (nurturing, conversion, loyalty).

5. Act Globally And Locally: There are some industry events which have the power to attract audiences from near and far – destination events. Start with these. Otherwise, audiences tend to operate within a certain market. Execute proprietary activities regionally to nurture, convert or drive retention and expansion of your audiences. Its often a lot easier for someone to attend a local breakfast seminar than book a flight to Las Vegas.

6. Select Events Carefully: Create and adhere to a robust decision-making process. Use the right criteria. Are your target customers at the event? Can you drive the audeince? Does the event audience meet your target demographic? Is it a key industry event? Is there an opportunity to tell your story?

7. Use Data-Based Business Rationale: “We’ve always attended.”, “Our competition will be there.”, “What will the industry / our customers think if we don’t go?” Are not sound business strategies or reasons for exhibiting. Do the math. If the event has the ability to meet your marketing and business objectives, then go. Otherwise, leave it on the table.

8. Decide Which Activities To Add, Change Or Remove: Understand that some events are underperformers because they fail to deliver the right audience. Others deliver the audience, but the way in which you participated may need to be adjusted to take better advantage of the opportunity. There are also always new opportunities available to reach your audiences. These opportunities may be created by third-party producers, or you can create them yourself. Explore all options before arriving at a final plan.

9. Save by Zero: If you have an event portfolio that is filled with legacy activities and potentially frought with waste. Start from scratch. Build your plan from the ground up. Make no assumptions. Treat every event with the same scrutiny when evaluating it for inclusion in you plan.

10. Keep The Plan Alive: Remember, no plan is ever final. Event portfolio planning is a continuous process that must be monitored throughout the year and adjusted regularly based on performance, learning, the environment and your own pipeline.

Portfolio planning can be a complex and sometimes politically-charged process. The right alignment to marketing and business objectives, strong team integration and disciplined process, will help increase your chances at delivering a flexible plan built for success. If you have any additional ideas or challenges you’ve faced in creating your plan, please share!

Portfolio Planning: 10 Tips for Creating The Right Mix is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

1. Make sure your event has clear objectives. You’d be surprised at major corporations who participate in events because “they always have” or “our competition is there”. Unfortunately, these are not sound business reasons for participation and there is often a great deal of wasted money and resources that go into events that yield no return as a result. Its important to have a business purpose to participate in an event, as well as established objectives. Remember objectives should be SMART.

Specific – Be specific about what you want to achieve as a result of the event.
Measurable – You should be able to measure performance against objectives.
Achievable – Ensure your objectives are achievable and attainable.
Realistic – You should have enough of the right resources to realistically achieve your objectives.
Time-bound – Objectives should be accomplished within a predetermined time limit.

An example would look something like this: “We will go to XYZ event to make 320 contacts which we will qualify into 100 leads by October 22, 2009.”

Its OK to have multiple objectives for a single event, but make sure you have a primary objective, and not many more to ensure you are geared for success. The key here is focus.

2. Create experiences designed to meet your objectives. Setting objectives is the easy part, doing the right things to accomplish them is another. Years ago I had a client who wanted to drive brand awareness with new prospects. This is a fine objective (although not SMART) however, they started by inviting only existing customers to a proprietary engagement, so there was no way to meet this particular objective. If your objective has to do with awareness, do things at your event that drive awareness. If your objective is about nurturing relationships with existing customers, do things that will engage and nurture them. One-size-fits-all events are far less successful than highly targeted, activities rich in experiences designed around objectives and audiences. An example here would be an objective like: “Drive understanding of XYZ product to 400 prospects by the end of XYZ expo.” Then, by creating an interactive, hands-on experience (perhaps a kiosk) to demonstrate features an benefits of a XYZ product to target audiences you’ve moved the needle.

3. Measure performance against your objectives. Measurement should always be based on objective, emphasize outcomes over outputs, and drive a culture of continuous improvement. If you’d like to drive sales, measure sales. If you’d like to increase awareness, survey your audiences before and after the event to see if their awareness of your company or product has increased as a result.

4. Do everything possible to generate the right audience. The most important part of any event is the audience. Its relatively easy to get an audience, but attracting the right audience is a different challenge altogether. Relying on show producers alone is fine, but their focus is to deliver as may people as possible to all sponsors and exhibitors. Its a good idea to supplement this with your own targeted activities. Use internal lists, alliances and business partners, purchased or rented media lists, social media, etc. Promote the event by communicating compelling reasons for your target audience to attend. Talk about those things which will activate their triggers and eliminate their inhibitors. What can they get at your event that they really want or need and cannot get anywhere else?

5. Follow up quickly and consistently. This is a big one. All too often, companies go into an event without a plan for how they will address leads afterwards. Have a process by which you will sort and manage hot, warm and cold leads. Establish different communications streams for each type of lead. Assign the appropriate resources to execute against this plan and make sure it happens. If a prospect is at an event looking for a solution and you do not address them, they will fill their need elsewhere.

6. Ensure there is appropriate funding for everything. Don’t run out of steam at the 80 yard line. Make sure you budget for audience generation, engagement at and around the event, follow up and measurement.

7. Invest in activities that offer the highest ROI. No one ever bought a multimillion dollar solution because of a sign at an event. Branded conference bags, toys, pens, t-shirts, etc. do not convince people to buy your product (unless that is what you are selling.) Once you have the right audience at an event, the most powerful motivators are those things that drive engagement with that audience. Conversations, case studies, networking, speaking, interactive workshops are great ways to engage and interact with your audiences. Invest in these things first.

8. Make your event part of a 360 approach. Remember, it takes more than one date to win the girl. The same goes with business relationships. Every event is important, but what’s more important is how you use that event in the overall marketing mix to court your suspects, prospects and customers. It is this cadence of touches and parts of the conversation which drive deeper, more meaningful relationships.

Eight Common Event Marketing Mistakes is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

Marketing 101: return on marketing investment comes in many forms, arising from your business objectives. But at the end of the day marketing is ultimately about driving sales.

Each channel plays its own role in enabling sales: advertising, product placement and other above-the-line channels for awareness and branding; direct communication such as email marketing and downloads for interest/nurturing/consideration; coupons and pricing discounts for customer activation etc.

This cycle is well understood, and for quite some time, industry groups such as the American Marketing Association have tackled the subject of integrated marketing with measurable ROI as one of their principle areas of interest.

What’s important for marketers to understand in today’s tough economic climate is that the typical marketing cycle is compressing, while the sales cycle is expanding. This forces marketers to innovate how they engage customers more quickly, more deeply and with more precision to move prospects to the point of conversion and beyond.

With the c-suite focusing on sales and viewing marketing ROI from that perspective, the channels that play a less direct role in engaging and converting prospects into customers are ceding turf (i.e. budget) to those that do generate specific customer interactions that directly lead to sales. No channel is disappearing. The mix is simply re-balancing to accommodate marketplace reality.

As you make these adjustments to the integrated marketing mix, proper measurement of the new ROI formula will be the key to maintaining and perhaps even increasing the marketing budget. In short, you need to revisit the data points you deem important, how you capture them, and how you report on that data in order to improve decision-making to increase short-terms sales performance without compromising long-term brand objectives.

Better questions to translate raw data into knowledge

We as marketers often get mired in the complexity of each and every metric, worried about what each number means, its relationship with all the other activities and influencers around us and what we can do to improve the results of our marketing efforts.

All said, we are all just trying to answer one simple question:

“Is my marketing successful or not?”

I’ve recently spent some time developing a measurement program for a CPG client. We’ve reviewed metrics on reach and frequency, examined page views and click-through rates, counted attendees, sweepstakes entries opt-ins, email open rates, and even entertained using semantic technologies to gauge how people are feeling about the brand on the social web.

All of these measurements are certainly important in understanding each campaign tactics’ performance and its contribution to the overall marketing mix, but at the end of the day, it is imperative we draw a correlation between what we did, and how much stuff we sold.

This basic truth has helped us to stay on track, and can help you in adapting your measurement system to the current environment.

Here’s a simple framework:

Success Metrics: Answer the question: “Are our marketing efforts successful or not?”
Example: We want to sell 25% more salad dressing during the summer months. Did your marketing program drive a 25% bump in sales? Yes or no.

Complementary Metrics: Help us understand degrees of success.
Example: We signed on 500 new retailers and increased share of shelf by 10%, positioning us for longer-term growth.

Diagnostic Metrics: Point to factors that help us understand what works, and what doesn’t.
Example: The online sweepstakes got 6 million entries, but only 2.5 million people opted in to learn more about recipes using our salad dressing.

This framework can be applied to print, broadcast, web, OOH, email, face-to-face, even social media.

In addition to this framework, this set of principles can increase your chance for success.

Eight simple principles:

Objectives are king
Benchmarking is critical to understanding what you are trying to achieve, and how you are doing along the way.

Keep it simple
Measure the most important key performance indicators that help you understand success, complementary and diagnostic performance – no more, no less.

Drive continuous improvement
The right measurement in the right place at the right time can help you optimize your program mid-stream, or build benchmarks for longer-term success.

Customize it
No two industries, companies or campaigns are alike. Measurement should be flexible enough to adapt to each situation, but standardized enough for consistent business reporting.

It’s not about the measurement
Focus on the outcome of the program not the outputs of the measurement model. Did you sell more stuff?

Learn and teach
Make sure you track progress and evaluate trends. Use this information to learn and educate your stakeholders on the program and its performance.

Understand resource commitments
Measurement takes time, tools, resources, management and money. Make sure you have the right level of support to ensure success.

Spend wisely
The cost of any measurement program should never outweigh the potential benefits

The key to driving ROI in the new marketing mix is to deploy a successful measurement program. With the right attention to the basics, and a disciplined approach to measurement you can be more precise in your current activity while laying the groundwork for superior performance down the road.

first published on the AMA Boston Blog 4/24/09

Measuring ROI in the New Integrated Marketing Mix is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0