The three Rs of the green movement can just as easily apply to effective business-to-business marketing. Keeping these three things in mind can help your precious marketing budget go further.
Reduce: find your key messages and stick to them
Saying less, more often, is the key to being heard. If you are consistently associated with specific things, then your company will be front of mind when that thing pops into someone’s head. If your business says one thing one day, another thing another day, then people are less likely to have a clear idea of what your company actually does.
Groups of three work well:
- What are the three things you want to be known for?
- What three core subjects is your company the expert for?
- Decide what they are and stick to them.
You can talk around the subject, but you need to stay broadly on the topic. To give you an idea our three at Clear Thought are: 1) Marketing that supports every step of the sales process, 2) Squeezing every penny from every marketing pound, and, 3) Marketing for business growth.
Re-use: the art of ‘pimping’ your content
Intelligent re-use of marketing content has three key benefits: 1) It helps you get more from your marketing budget, 2) It means that people see your message repeated multiple times so it’s more likely to stick, and, 3) It extends your reach by appealing to people who like to consume different media formats (some people like print, some video, some audio, etc.).
This is what John Watton, CMO of Shipserv and 2010 B2B Marketer of the Year, calls this “pimping your content”. And, he’s a master of it. Watch and learn people, watch and learn.
Recycle: if they haven’t seen it, you can use it again, and again
A campaign mindset puts perfectly good ideas out to pasture when they have plenty more life in them. It’s wasteful of the ideas and it’s wasteful of the investment. (Check out John’s presentation ‘The campaign is dead‘ from last year’s B2B Conference)
Let’s imagine that you run a campaign that includes a great paper written by one of your top experts, you then invite people to a live web seminar with the expert in question. A great lead generation activity. But, just because you’ve done it once, why does that mean you can’t do it again? Why not roll it over every 12 weeks, sending the details to new contacts you’ve made in that time frame? Firstly, they probably don’t even know that you did it before. Secondly, if they do – they almost certainly don’t care. Mailchimp run the same live webinars every week, and it works well for them because they find a new audience each time.
What’s even better these days is that you can set this up to run itself. Using an ‘autoresponder’ or triggered campaign means that you can set-up a whole series of content that is released in a given time period. People sign-up and the system feeds the campaign out to that person from that day. They specify the start time, not you.
So, take a look through your marketing back catalogue… what can you reduce, re-use or recycle?
This article originally appeared on the Marketing Clear Thinking blog.
