Brainstorm created a proprietary online tool to track B Series activity including offer page visits, video views, downloads, survey data and much more.

39% increase in average daily hits
on BrainstormBrand.com during the
B Series promotion.

Objectives, Then Numbers

The B Series was created as the initial step in an ongoing awareness campaign targeted to a group of C-level marketing executives and decision makers with little or no previous knowledge of Brainstorm. Our goal for the multiple-component B2B campaign was simply to build name recognition and knowledge of our firm’s capabilities.

All statistics and results were measured with that primary objective in mind, but we were also interested in how each piece performed. Because of the nature of the campaign and the protracted sales cycle in our industry, an accurate ROI measurement isn’t yet feasible; however we created a unique offer landing page for each recipient and an online tool to track their individual responses. With a total response rate of 14%, unique visits to the offer site looked like this:

B Series Response Rates

What Worked

Our mass HTML email had a 22% open rate and 3% unique click-throughs; however, the fourth piece in the series, the personal email, was the most effective with 7.5% of recipients visiting the offer page. This strong response confirms that multiple touchpoints built name recognition. After several contacts, recipients felt comfortable opening an email from someone they didn’t know and clicking through to learn more about our company.

18% of the respondents
visited the offer site multiple times.

Visitor Activity

Once visitors were at the offer site, 29% watched a video, 50% downloaded the Web 2.0 Summary Sheet and 50% downloaded the MediaSphere.

Telling Numbers

In addition to traffic to the offer page, during the three initial mailers and the mass HTML email, average hits per day on our corporate website increased 50% over the preceding 15 days. After the personal email, average hits per day were up 79% over pre-campaign traffic. Across the two and a half-month promotion, average daily hits increased 39% overall.

25% increase in
direct traffic to BrainstormBrand.com
during the promotion.

What We’d Do Differently

Two weeks toward the end of the campaign were reserved for three of Brainstorm’s principals to make personal follow-up phone calls—not to hard sell, but to merely introduce themselves. It proved difficult to connect with a live person. We left voicemail and spoke to several people, but the results weren’t worth the effort of calling the entire list. Next time, we’ll follow up via phone with only individuals who have expressed a tacit interest by taking specific action while visiting the offer site.

Qualitative Metrics

Relying on percentages and numbers alone is ill-advised when measuring objectives. A myriad of variables affect the success of any consumer or B2B marketing campaign: need, timing, industry, execution, audience, and messaging are just a few.

Our initial effort exceeded our expectations by creating awareness and developing relationships that have resulted in new work and ongoing discussions with an audience previously unaware of us. We will continue to reach out to these individuals throughout 2008 in an attempt to build trust and relationship equity through various means.

B Series Resources

To read previous installments in this series or download one of the marketing tools from the offer, click on a link below or “B Series” under topics:

The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview
The B Series Part 2: Strategic Design & Messaging
The B Series Part 3: The Componentry
The B Series Part 4: Personalization
The B Series Part 5: Offers and Incentives

Web 2.0 and Generation Me | 524 KB .pdf

The MediaSphere | 1.1 MB .pdf

B Series timeline: personal touchpoints, destination points

Web 2.0 and Generation Me download, one of three B Series offers

Knowledge leads to action. Give them the gift of useful and relevant knowledge, and in return they will give you brand loyalty and word-of-mouth.

—Eran Livneh, Marketingprofs.com

Show, and Tell

The B Series awareness campaign was designed to introduce Brainstorm’s strategic branding, design, and interactive media capabilities to a select group of marketing executives who were not familiar with our company. As part of that introduction, we wanted to provide something of value to the recipients—incentives they might find useful—that would also demonstrate our expertise.

Three Offers

In our bid to connect with our audience we offered three items, an informational download about a specific demographic, a digital marketing reference chart, and a t-shirt.

B Relevant

Our first B Series offer was a summary sheet of our popular Web 2.0 and Generation Me presentation. The paper condenses the 2 hour presentation into a downloadable 12-page pdf (below).

Initially developed to assist our higher education clients understand how current high school and college-aged students think and communicate, we discovered many of our corporate clients wanted to better understand that demographic as well. Therefore, we felt the offer would be relevant and useful to members of the B Series audience.

Web 2.0 and Generation Me | 524 KB .pdf

B Informed

Our second offer, The MediaSphere (below), is a tool we created to help marketers plan and develop an integrated communication strategy. The MediaSphere is a single source menu and glossary of both traditional and emerging channel options available to today’s marketers.

Our clients are using it as tool to develop initial marketing mix ideas, as a learning resource, for war room brainstorming, and even as a way to mitigate interdepartmental communication barriers.

The MediaSphere | 1.1 MB .pdf

The MediaSphere chart

B Clothed

If useful knowledge-based tools are the new black of incentives and offers, t-shirts are retro noir. Tactile, fun and useful, we offered a B brilliant t-shirt for completing a 3-minute post-campaign online survey. In this case the rationale behind the offer is clear and straightforward, less trust-building, more “Thank you!”

The shirt is purposely devoid of urls or any direct promotion of our firm. This group doesn’t represent existing customers or friends. They know where they got the shirt and we just want them to enjoy wearing it.

See the shirt design in The B Series Part 3: The Componentry article.

No Hidden Agendas

In B2B communications to C-level executives it’s important to respect the recipient’s time and focus on their needs. Dangling incentive carrots to obtain email opt-ins or artificially inflate response statistics is counterintuitive and may land you on SPAM blacklists.

Our Web 2.0 and MediaSphere pieces were offered without obligation simply to demonstrate our capabilities.

The Priority

The primary objective of the B Series was to create awareness. By offering our audience useful tools, we positioned ourselves as brand strategists here to serve and support, and established a foundation for trust. If recipients agree, they’ll opt-in—genuinely. It’s all about creating value, dialog and trust—not building stats for stats sake.

Useful tools and educational materials are a great way to connect and communicate information about your company. Consider putting your audience first and they may just reciprocate.

Up Next

The B Series Part 6: The Metrics

To read previous installments in this series click on one of the links below or “B Series” under topics:

The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview
The B Series Part 2: Strategic Design & Messaging
The B Series Part 3: The Componentry
The B Series Part 4: Personalization

B Series B Bold element

“A person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.�?
-Dale Carnegie

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Not yet on a first name basis with the 200 individuals we targeted in our B Series awareness campaign, we wanted to introduce ourselves strategically and make a tremendous first impression without being too forward.

Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

There are a myriad of personalization methods and options available; however, in business-to-business (B2B) correspondence to C-level executives, it’s presumptuous to use too friendly an approach.

Personal Touches

Using a hand-picked database of individuals within companies we knew would be a good fit for our experience and capabilities, the campaign tailored written communication to individual readers based on personal attributes, details or actions. We addressed recipients by their first name or professional title only once in the salutation of each piece. We also feathered in their company name in customized copy only when and where it made sense.

Behind the Scenes

Each outgoing piece invited the recipient to download free marketing materials from a web page accessible via a username and password. This allowed us to identify individual visitors and greet them online with a personalized message and in some test cases, a video specifically recorded for them.

Our analytics recorded when a recipient visited the web page and what they viewed and downloaded while they were there. This information was then referenced in context in the next piece they received—without calling undue attention to it.

Click for an overview of B Series personal touchpoints, destination points and timeline.

Delivery

Voice was a critical aesthetic touch that displayed our company’s personality in a tone appropriate to the audience, in a way that made the technology behind the message disappear. In the B Series, we communicated in a warm, friendly, personable manner that, by design, wasn’t too familiar.

Whether our deliverable is design, consultation, brand revitalization, a decision-tree interactive piece, or packaging, our solutions spring from individual customer needs and desires. Therefore, each touchpoint contained a succinct message defining ways in which Brainstorm fulfills our clients’ goals.

An Ongoing Effort

As an awareness campaign, the B Series was simply a request for an initial introduction—a first step in earning the right to address a select group of people by their first names.

Building an introduction into a long-term business relationship takes time and effort. To that end, just as we did before hand-selecting our list, we continue to read and follow business news for each company with which we engaged, commenting and congratulating as appropriate.

Because genuine interest may just be the second sweetest sound in any language.

Up Next

The B Series Part 5: Offers & Incentives

To read previous installments in this series click on one of the links below or click “B Series” under topics:

The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview
The B Series Part 2: Strategic Design & Messaging
The B Series Part 3: The Componentry

B brilliant t-shirt premium

“Brochures rarely lead to a sale. They lead to a sales call. So a brochure has to be engaging and hopefully viral.” -Seth Godin

Maintaining Perspective

To expect to develop a strategic partner relationship from a single touchpoint would be naive. Therefore, our recent B Series awareness campaign included many touchpoints in a variety of media to convey distinct and singular messages about our capabilities to a group of marketing executives not otherwise familiar with Brainstorm.

The Components

The B Series consisted of 7 primary touchpoints: 3 direct mail brochures, 1 HTML email, 1 personal text-based email, 1 personal phone call, and 1 letter.

The program also contained elements and destination points to support the primary touchpoints: a web page containing videos, 2 downloadable marketing tools, and an online survey about the campaign with a t-shirt offer and order page.

In this article we’ll touch on the primary components of the program with supporting elements discussed in future B Series articles.

Touchpoint #1

Four-page print piece. Entitled B noticed, this first mailer introduced Brainstorm and set the tone for the rest of the series. B noticed showcased a variety of our work by medium as well as industry, for clients large and small, thus establishing our capabilities. The headline, B noticed, implied that the reader could benefit from similar efforts.

The call to action drove readers to the web to download a free informational marketing tool.

We selected clear envelopes to maximize visibility for our bold “B” theme imagery and used a separate address card insert with promotional content on the back to enable us to use all four pages of the brochure for copy.

Touchpoint #2

Four-page print piece. The intent of our second touchpoint, B bold, was to build brand recognition by carrying through the look, feel and tone of the first mailer. It was also meant to entice the curiosity of anyone who hadn’t taken the time to look at the first piece by talking about breaking norms and placing trust in creative, unique, and innovative solutions.

The call to action invited the reader to go online where a second informational marketing download had been added.

Touchpoint #3

HTML email. For our third contact point, B innovative, we utilized the same basic design elements in an Exact Target HTML email. Using the same voice but a bit more direct to keep it brief, we referenced past touchpoints, talked about the marketing tools, and provided contact information and links to the downloads, this blog series, and our website.

Touchpoint #4

Four-page print piece. We went back to print for the B brilliant mailer, which spoke to our approach, thinking, and problem solving skills on behalf of our clients. The call to action drove readers to this blog and reminded them again of the marketing tool downloads. The continuity in look, feel, and name was intended to foster even more familiarity and positive feelings about our brand.

Touchpoint #5

Text-based, personal email. We utilized a personal email from one of three Brainstorm partners to convey a personal invitation, custom crafted for its recipient. We mentioned we would be calling to follow up in a week and offered a direct link to the marketing tools again if the individual had not yet downloaded them.

We sacrificed some measurability for a personal connection on this component. We’ll talk more about measurability in a future article.

Touchpoint #6

Phone calls. One week after the email, each of the partners called their contacts to follow up. The calls were low key with no hard sell tactics. Partners asked if the recipient had received the materials and what they thought of them. The final step was to request a brief meeting simply for a personal introduction.

Touchpoint #7

Monarch letter. This personal, executive-sized letter encouraged the recipient to give us feedback on our campaign via a very brief web survey we developed. We incentivized them with a free B brilliant t-shirt for their participation.

And, as with every touchpoint in the campaign, if the reader had not yet downloaded the marketing tools, we reminded them that they were still available.

The Progression

You can see the B Series advance from the first mailer with Brainstorm as an unknown entity to a phone call and in-person meeting which marked the start of a personal relationship with a potential client.

To the point of Seth Godin’s quote at the beginning of this article, the B Series represents just the first leg of a long-term trust building communication program.

Up Next

The B Series Part 4: Personalization

To read previous installments in this series click on one of the links below or click “B Series” under topics:

The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview
The B Series Part 2: Strategic Design & Messaging

The B Series

In this installment of our ongoing series on Brainstorm’s recent awareness campaign we’ll explore some of the design and messaging strategies we considered during development.

About the B

Multi-part campaigns require an overarching theme and a supporting look or graphic to provide a thread of continuity. Each time a simple, identifiable theme is executed it builds recognition. We settled on a bold graphic “B�? motif for our theme.

B the Noun

The letter B functions as a single identifying element—a symbol recipients imbue with meaning as elements of Brainstorm are revealed throughout the campaign. The central B element is inextricably linked to our brand logotype by inference. And, the B serves as both a visual cue, “Ah, the B people,�? and a graphic people will connect to through repetition, “Where have I seen that B before?�?

B the Verb

We also used the letter B as a phonetic representation of the verb “(to) be�? in headlines and for strategic emphasis in limited usage elsewhere.

The B was integrated into a stark black and white op-art, yet classic, graphic which became the B upon which all our communications were built.

What to Convey

A primary goal of direct marketing is to get noticed. A portion of our campaign was delivered via traditional direct mail, so it was important to lead with a bold, graphic look and deliver a simple message. We built the campaign around messaging that conveyed our areas of expertise:

Noteworthy Capability: Demonstrating the depth of the traditional and digital services which get our clients noticed through visual examples and positioning text, i.e., from consumer packaging to web initiatives, and strategic inception to final deliverable.

Creative Differentiation: Establishing our strengths in boldly, conceptually and appropriately differentiating our clients’ brands in the marketplace.

Strategic Influence: Conveying the benefits of our collaborative, intelligent approach, and thought leadership borne of our knowledge and experience in both traditional and digital design and branding.

Using the B theme, we framed each statement as a personalized benefit to the reader, paring each talking point down to a single encapsulating thought. The three punchy messages we delivered were:

B noticed.
B bold.
B brilliant.

All subsequent awareness messaging supported a relational dialog under the umbrella of these three primary concepts.

Overt or Covert?

Each touchpoint offered recipients an informational download. Internal discussions centered around the merits and drawbacks of leading with the offer—straightforward and blatant—or leading with conceptual messaging which required some involvement from the reader. Should we be overt or covert?

In the end we opted to lead with concept. Why? As a B2B branding and design firm we’re offering relational services, not selling a consumer product. The downloads were designed to augment our main message—not to be the main message. And, this was an awareness campaign to introduce our capabilities to marketing executives, not a direct sale mechanism.

Frequency and Consistency

To achieve our overarching objective to generate awareness, we focused on frequency and consistency, hallmarks of memorable marketing and brand building campaigns.

Our strategy included multiple touchpoints delivered over two months—frequent enough to engender memorability, not often enough to be overwhelming.

We also established design element guidelines to ensure consistency and recognizability across all component pieces, with the flexibility to allow for distinctive messaging and styling from one piece to the next.

Other Goals

In addition to frequency and consistency there were other ancillary benchmarks against which we scrubbed all of our communications:

• Well-written: A direct, understandable message written in a personal and engaging voice
• Well-designed: Graphically intriguing, easily read
• Styling: Austere, crisp, bold, yet approachable
• Convey Capabilities: Demonstrate through example and execution
• Never Condescend: Our target audience is astute and highly knowledgeable
• Maximize Messaging: Make wise use of the database in both on and off-line communications
• Offer Value: Ensure that recipients’ time is well-spent and worthwhile for them both tangibly and intangibly

What’s It All Mean?

A multi-tiered marketing campaign may seem simple, but the best formula for success begins with a strategy that addresses the goals for the overall campaign and how they will be achieved. Design and messaging are just a portion of what goes into a well-formulated integrated marketing plan.

Up Next

The B Series Part 3: Component Selection, read it here

If you missed The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview, read it here.