One thing about great marketers:* we never stop testing, adjusting, and refining. We always poke the bear to get better results.
In this case, the bear was my response to a B2C question during a job interview. I defined the “C” persona (retail consumer) too tightly. In my current niche, retail consumer also refers to retail investors... or in niche jargon, as “investomers.” I had a brainfart during the (video!) interview and told a clumsy story. I had a MUCH better narrative to share. But, of course, this came to me at 2:30 in the morning!
So, whether it was poking the bear or good marketing, I emailed them a follow-up narrative.
The B2C strategy that did not go well at first, and that I had to turn around:
Each month, I market via email, social and PR, into a database of 40,000 individual “mom & pop” investors, working to engage them into a series of webinars. It works well, with attendance dependent on their interest on an exact presenter or topic.
I needed to create a whoppingly large whitepaper research report from this retail audience, based on a 36-question survey. So, I built the survey and integrated it into the webinar environment, enticing the listeners to participate in real-time while they were logged in. Hey, they were already engaged, of course it will work!
Ummmm… not so much.
My errors were two-fold:
- Who the heck has the time to take a 36-question survey? Of course, I knew it was long, dammit.
- I misjudged the consumers’ appetite to participate, even though they were actively engaged in the platform. “What’s in it for me?” An iPad raffle did not compel them, either
Changing strategies:
Simply, I gamified the survey for the audience and reset my expectations – and strategy for the results.
- Rather than one, time-consuming survey, I broke the survey into 36 separate “survey-snacks.”
- Rather than engaging the audience in real-time during the webinars, I set up an automated lead-generation program that sent one question per week, on Saturday morning. This took my senior team by surprise, but I convinced them to take off their B2B hats and think “retail.” Most all of the email addresses are personal Gmails, etc.
- Rather than a single iPad raffle, I changed the raffle to an iPad Mini EACH WEEK as well as integrated the “participation badges” concept from the webinars into the raffle. Specifically, each week, when a customer answers a question, (as well as watches a webinar) they get an additional, cumulative “ticket” into the raffle. It ups their odds and their rewards ongoing participation.
- I received over 35,000 individual responses.
Most importantly, I reset my strategy:
- The initial goal was to gather unique retail data and write a whitepaper report for use as a major piece of content and then as follow-up smaller content drips of the data.
- I reversed my thinking. I released the fresh, inbound data every two weeks, one question/answer at a time - as colorful infographics. I both blogged and emailed the results out. This gave me months of unique content.
- About half way through the program, I released a preliminary report – gated to collected contact information.
- At the end of the survey, I released the full (gated) report as well as spoke at seminars and created a video.
*Yeah, I called myself great, but so do others.