Over the past two years our business has focused on generating sales leads for our Microsoft Dynamics GP business through informational seminars we hold in our local community. I personally believe that most good marketing is achieved through plagiarism, and copying what works for others is definitely part of my strategy. My chief competitor in our particular region had incredible success selling ERP systems to manufacturing companies in South Western Ontario (which is where we are located) and I decided to try and emulate their success with our own efforts.

It turns out that executing seminars and driving people to them is not as easy as it looked from the outside. The challenge is getting the attention of business people who’s time is valuable and (in many cases) who’s attention span is short. It is really not as easy as it might seem. My competitor has a large number of telemarketers who can spend hundreds of hours a week calling to fill seminars with attendees. Even with the huge number of calls they can put in, they are luckily to get 10 people out to an event. Our business is small and our resources are not nearly as large as Sales Inc – so I needed a much less costly way to achieve the same thing. I set my budget at approximately $5000 an event and we went from there with the hope that we could eventually get that down significantly.

Over the past 18 months we’ve run 4 information seminar event campaigns, with varying success. The costs of these events were roughly the same (except event four). I’ll go over their relative success.

Event one we printed postcards designed to be returned to us by interested parties. These were mailed along with an introductory letter. This campaign was our second most successful, but some of the explanation for that is that the subject matter was very compelling (a government grant we were educating prospects about). About 7 to 8 companies attended this event.

Event two was our least successful to date. In this case we tried a multiplier approach to try and establish as many points of contact or “touches” as possible. We printed several thousand postcards, which we mailed (in bulk and unaddressed) to all commercial business areas of our city (Kitchener, Ontario – about half a million total population). We published a substantial ad in a local business magazine. We called over a thousand accounts to drive them to the event. A total of 2 companies attended this event. The cost per attendee was absolutely unsustainable.

Event three was more successful than the second (and its a good thing too). The approach included two letters, the second of which included a special “call to action” that was quite unique. This call to action was a ticket for the event, printed and showing the value of $30 on it. We had received a similar ticket from a local firm for their seminar, and realized that it was very effective. We plagiarized the idea, and sent the first letter out without the ticket following it with the tickets one week before the event. We were extremely surprised by the results. People were fascinated by these tickets and we had 6 companies attend. Most of the companies that came had decided at the last minute to attend, and brought their tickets with them.

Before I describe event four, I wanted to really dig into the results of number three. After we executed this campaign we realized that by sending the tickets out so late we had not had anywhere near the results we could have. Even so we had a lot of people attend this event specifically because of our tickets. They had been “Sticky,” meaning that they had not just been thrown in the garbage. We found out that they had been passed around the office to see who could attend.

Event four we decided to dramatically reduce our costs. Event four came in about 33% less than the other events. We chose to send only one letter with tickets about four weeks before the event (to provide more time for people to plan ahead). We telephoned each company that received tickets once to try and confirm their attendance. In the past we had called up to 3 times each, leaving voice mail and then following up with them. The day of the event we had terrible weather. I must admit that I had expected a lot of attendees before the weather turned so bad. Traffic was chaos. The total attendees was 16 and 10 companies were represented. I believe we would have had double that if the weather had been good.

In summary this is what we found. There needs to be something compelling with the letter or other communication we send. It doesn’t need to be extremely expensive – it just needs to grab the attention of the target audience. A regular letter in an envelope gets thrown in the garbage with all the other junk mail businesses get. When something drops out of that envelope other than just the letter — almost anything really — we have found that the correspondence becomes “sticky.” It gets passed around and it gets attention. That one item is worth 10 letters because it circulates around the office and is seen by many people.

The theory of marketing (based on my amateur research) relies on as many “touches” of prospects by your message. Email, letters, postcards, phone calls and the like must be repeated over and over until you make your contact. This is an incredibly expensive proposition for those of us with small businesses. Finding the “sticky” marketing message is something that both saves money and achieves incredible marketing results.

(You can read more about Sticky messages in the book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell at his website http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html )

Source by Robert Jolliffe