Is what you want, what you really need?
To get the best results, look more deeply into your objectives.
Over time we have found that some campaign objectives provided by clients can be too broad. And in the context of what we have been asked to do the objectives would be extremely hard, or impossible to achieve.
Here are a couple of examples where we helped clients look more deeply at their objectives.
A major bank asked us to create a programme to introduce personal banking customers to Private Banking. Past experience told us that their proposed strategy wouldn't deliver. Our advice was to refocus the attention on identifying potential Private Banking customers amongst the customer base rather than on the execution. This change of focus lead us to using the relationship branch managers held with potential customers and creating a campaign that the branch managers sent out. Of course we designed and wrote everything and gave each branch a pack on 'what to do' - but the branches did it themselves. This was a huge success.
Another client wanted to generate sales meetings with senior execs of multinational companies and they proposed direct mail. We felt that just using direct mail wouldn’t meet this objective. Instead we advised that direct mail would do a great job in ‘opening doors’ for their sales team. Our packs were very personal and very effective. When our client’s sales team called, not only did the recipients take the call 25% converted to a sales meeting!!
Make the right decisions early
What these examples demonstrate is that what you might initially think is the objective doesn't necessarily fit with what can be achieved. So when setting objectives it is important not only to make them realistic but also to ensure the media you propose to use is the right one for the job.
Sure we all want more sales. But having broad objectives can lead to wasting money and not focussing on the issues that will ultimately increase your sales.
We have just advised a company who want to get ‘into' social media that this might be like flushing money down the toilet. No we’re not against social media and the company didn't object to our flippant remark (we hope). A product demo on Youtube may be worth doing if you have products that are difficult to explain or have a great feature. But, and it's a big but, you need to decide what you are trying to achieve before you start picking the media you intend to use.
At Stream we believe the secret to creating successful campaigns is really getting to grips with exactly what the objective is. So if you need a hand in deciding what you can achieve then click here or give me a call.
