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