Either autonomously or as part of a team, I’ve managed several types of marketing campaign including email, social, and multi-channel. My experience has largely been online, but many of the same principles can be applied to offline campaign elements such as postcard mailers, call center outreach or even guerrilla tactics.
Here are some examples of campaigns I’ve either managed or played a role in:
Zynx Health Conference
For the annual conference of Zynx Health, the marketing team put together a yearly multi-channel campaign targeting the company’s clients and partners. The campaign’s goal is to bring clients to the conference, and to attract sponsorships from partner organizations.
The Challenge: Sell as many conference registrations as possible, and fill all partner sponsorship opportunities.
Approach: One year the campaign adopted a historic theme, including a slogan, imagery, and conference focus befitting the history of the venue. Themed materials were developed – a logo and template for the conference website, an email template, printed postcard fliers, brochures, and giveaway items. The team put together a promotional calendar covering the stages of the conference, from the call for speakers down to final-week registration discounts and special coupons. Online portals were built where clients could register or where partners could choose sponsorship opportunities, and purchases were tracked in a built-in ecommerce system. We leveraged email, social media and direct-mail, as well as sales talking points and leave-behind materials for client-facing reps. Electronic channels leveraged response metrics to help shape messaging. Messaging also evolved to gradually promote more enticing conference topics, keeping audiences checking in.
Results: Promotion for that year resulted in a much sharper takeoff in registrations than the prior year, with much more engagement through social media and more word of mouth. Registrations generally kept ahead of prior years, despite a less accessible venue.
Travel RN Jobs
Travel RN Jobs was a site I created to help my wife, who is a travel nurse recruiter, connect with travel nurse leads. Before this she received leads only from other nurses, or occasionally from her company’s limited database. No budget was set aside for this project.
The Challenge: Attract new, qualified online travel nurse leads to supplement offline leads.
Approach: This simple campaign consisted of a website, a Twitter page, and a brief round of paid search. I created a quick, functional, highly informative WordPress site and optimized it to attract natural search for a set of primary and long-tail keywords. I then created a Twitter page, using it to post featured jobs and travel nursing advice using common nursing hashtags. Additionally, I created a brief PPC campaign (courtesy of a one-time Google Adwords promotion), halting it once the promotional funds ran out. The concept of print fliers was briefly entertained, but they were not needed.
Results: The campaign ran at full volume for around two weeks, during which time the site shot up to the front page of Google’s search results for its primary keyword. Leads came in regularly from Twitter and from paid search. As I leveled efforts off, natural search gradually took over. The site continued to pitch travel nurses at a relaxed pace for years until I discontinued it due to hosting issues.
