Sir Speedy Centennial

In pursuit of an effective electronic and print campaign, you, like us, have probably tried everything possible: click thrus, banners, emails, web sites, news releases, and blogs. Have you been happy with the results? If not, Sir Speedy Centennial can help.

Our marketing services are designed to parlay today’s technology into campaign boosts that ensure you will not only benefit from  increased response rates, but also that you understand what type of customers responded to which offer, who responded, and why they responded. Armed with this, each successive campaign is bound to be more effective and give you a better return on your investment.

While we believe that our expertise will make your projects more effective, we also know that your participation is critical. You should understand the process so that you can help to craft the best-possible approach. As a team, we will plan, execute, and measure your campaigns to garner both you and us great, reliable results. Here’s how:

Choose a campaign. With any good strategy, you need to first choose the path you will take to attain the goal. In marketing that means defining the campaign: what is the offer?

One of the most-attractive benefits of online marketing is that you may deliver something to the customer immediately. That might be a white paper, a video, a software application, or a myriad of other assets that can be stored and retrieved without any user intervention. Don’t forget to use this type of instant gratification offer when you plan a campaign. People always want something of value for free.

Stay focused. As you make your offer, be clear. It’s typically best to state a single offer or call to action. Don’t give choices. Provide something that is a solution to the buyer’s or visitor’s problem.

Define the approach. Consider your options and then decide how you will deliver your message. Will you send both print and email versions? Will you create a news release? How about a blog posting? Don’t forget the social-media outlets. Will you tweet? Will you personalize? Will you survey? All of these are good options.

Set your expectations. What do you want to get from this campaign? Product sales? New customers? Re-activation of past customers? Opinions? Be realistic though — while your first effort is very likely to be successful, especially under the guidance of Sir Speedy Centennial, but there is much to learn about your customers. You’ll learn a little more with each campaign and over time you will be able to consistently achieve predictable results.

Send press and news releases. Press announcements are hey-look-at-our-great-accomplishment notices whereas news announcements are intended for people who maintain a blog site. News releases are generally a bit more low-key and designed to keep interested parties up to date on your general day-to-day product or company announcements. Don’t underestimate the power of the blogger — be sure to include news releases as part of your campaign.

Take a page from the gaming playbook. If you’re planning a really big campaign with strong appeal, consider telling the world about it BEFORE you tell the world about. Nearly all video-game manufacturers use this approach to create a little buzz before the actual event.

Participate in social media. There are about 140 social media sites — including: Facebook®, Plaxo®, MySpace®, Gawkk®, Twitter®, and more — but it’s not necessary to include them all. Become a member of the sites where you will find large pools of customers interested in what you have to say. Be careful though, some sites specifically do not allow you to tout your own company or services.

Create landing pages for everything. The best way to measure visitors and follow their path through your site is to create landing pages specifically for your campaign. Don’t be afraid to create as many as you need to help you understand your customers’ behavior — most times one is simply not enough.

Engage the visitor. Ensure that your visitors find lots of content at your site to keep them interested. Aside from reiterating your offer, provide them with stories to read or blog postings that support your position or offer. This is your real estate; use it to your best advantage. This might even include banner ads for other offers within your site, white papers, videos, or podcasts.

Optimize your effort. SEO is the optimization of the content of your web site for the purpose of raising your visibility and rankings within search engines. As a general rule, the more pages you have within your site, the better off you are. Of course, this does depend on whether or not the pages are optimized in pursuit of your goal and that the content of the pages are relevant.

Your goal with your site should be to become recognized as an authority on your given topic; post as much content as possible that supports and promotes this assertation. There are dozens and dozens of tips about how to best optimize your pages — far too many for the space of this article — and Sir Speedy Centennial can help guide you in ways to improve your current pages alongside the new campaign’s pages.

Add meta tags. Meta tags are a collection of key words and phrases that describe the content of your site. These are hidden in the code of the page rather than as a visible piece of content. Meta tags must be relevant and must be validated by the actual content of the page. That means that the text on the page must align with the meta tags. If the text on your page is about training dogs, then your meta tags should include dog, training, guard, obedient, and the like. If your meta tags are about dentists, your site will not gain in validity.

Meta tags are typically added to your pages by the web designer, but Sir Speedy Centennial will add meta tags and meta descriptions to your campaign’s landing pages as part of their services. This will improve the performance of your campaign.

Add meta descriptions. Meta descriptions, like meta tags, are contained within the HTML or code of the page. This information is what will be displayed when someone does a search on one of your key words or phrases that are displayed in the search results. This is a great way to ensure that search engines tell the visitor exactly what you want them to know.

Submit a site map. Site maps are a critical part of any good search-engine optimization plan. A site map is a list of the pages within your site. You pass this map to search engines so that they know what pages are within your site and so they know which pages to index (list in search results) and which should be skipped.

Monitor the success. Once you and Sir Speedy Centenninal have created your campaign, landing pages, news releases, email, direct mail, site map, announcements, social media, meta tags, and meta description, you’ll be ready for the most-important step: analytics.

Unlike traditional print campaigns where the best results came from the shotgun approach (send to everyone, cross your fingers, and hope for the best), today’s print and email campaign combinations give you an unparalleled visibility into the interest, success, and failures of your project.

Using analytics, you and Sir Speedy Centennial will be able to track the effectiveness of your site, including information such as:

• Location of the visitor’s computer (IP location)
• Type of browser the visitor used
• Amount of time the visitor spent on the page
• Amount of time the visitor spent in the site
• Whether the visitor came to page one and left or if they visited other pages

Sir Speedy Centennial will help you to understand the significance of each of these data points, and much more.

The next steps

Once you have successfully sent your campaign and analyzed the results, you will be armed with lots of information that will help you to being the next campaign. Sir Speedy Centennial will work with you to turn these results into modifications for future campaigns. We also can follow a campaign with a survey for even more information.

Ready to get started? Click here to request an appointment or give us a call at 303 799 4383. We look forward to hearing from you.

Marketing and sales messages are really important — I think we can all agree on that — but analyzing your messaging is where the smart money is. Every campaign should use analytics to measure success and provide feedback that helps you to modify future campaigns based on these results.

Email messaging to our customers doesn’t always fall in the category of marketing, sometimes it’s just messaging: a new product we’ve added, a store opening, an invitation, a posted report. The common thread is that we are sending an electronic message. Electronic messages can include an easy-to-use click-thru link that lands the customer squarely on a custom (measured and analyzed) web page.

By way of example, let’s consider that you do have a customer message to impart; perhaps an invitation to attend a webcast. There are lots of great opportunities in this email message, so let’s not forget to use personalization for the salutation and, if possible, more personalization in the body to speak to the customer.

Now that you have the event and the message, plan ahead so that you get the best analytics possible. The key to this step is that you want to divide your email list randomly; this is called segmenting. Don’t segment by state or gender. To really get a feel for how your customers are responding, it’s imperative that you don’t segment them in a manner that might skew your results. It may be that people who work at a particular type of job find your topic interesting and that the people to hold this job are more often men than women. Segmenting by gender will assuredly return artificial results.

If you have a very large list, start with just a few names — somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 names per group — and create a separate landing page for each group’s registration. Each group’s invitation should be worded slightly differently — the same invitation, just try appealing to their interest with different approaches. The landing pages should include a form where your customer can register for the event. When a web form is completed, it is either collected in a database or emailed to a pre-defined recipient; maybe that’s you.

Though analytics applications make it simple to track how many people click on the landing-page link and even how much time they spent on the landing page, it’s not critical. If you are managing your own list and the completed registration forms are forwarded to you, it will be easy enough to match up which of your groups is responding best. This tells you something about your message. Adapt and resend — that’s the beauty of an email campaign.

Don’t forget to create a new landing page. You want to know whether or not you experience the same rate of success with this group as with the test group.
It’s easy to analyze once and then get stuck in a rut. Don’t be fooled. Just because one message type does well once, doesn’t mean it will work every time. Try sending HTML messages compared to plain text. Try including graphics in some and not in others. No matter the variables of the test, every message campaign should start with one. It’s an easy first step, but it can keep you from sending an ineffective message; or worse.

We all want to ensure effective messaging and with today’s electronic ankle bracelets attached, we stand to create successively progressive results. It makes the gamble of messaging a whole lot less risky. Sir Speedy Centennial is with you every step of the way. We will help you to segment your list, create messaging, analyze results, and modify messages based on these results. Click here to email our owner and get started today.