Launching a Targeted Marketing Campaign

If you had told me three years ago, when I started writing my business app, that the marketing campaign was going to be just as hard as writing the app, I would not have believed you.

I naively thought a few press releases, some CPC ads, and a series of social media postings was all that was needed to get the word out and have my app viewed by many.

But the reality is, with all the marketing noise out there, you really have to focus your efforts on the specific vertical markets your products or services address. If you do not “target” your marketing efforts, you will likely spend a lot of money and return minimal results.

So how to target a marketing campaign? Start with the old school off-line efforts.

Find the tradeshows, BIAs, community groups or programs that offer you a concentrated audience of perspective buyers to present to.

My next event will be the eSAX Entrepreneur Networking Event taking place on Jan. 6^th in Ottawa. I will have a sponsorship booth in the marketplace.

This event is a perfect example. eSAX offers me a concentrated group of business start-ups and entrepreneurs looking to increase their number of return customers. Exactly what my app offers organizations!

As always prepare signage and collaterals to support the event. Have a look at what I’ve prepared for the Jan. 6^th event here.

Attendee Swag Bag stuffer

Hand out to drive attendees to booth

Door Prize Gift Certificate 

Booth Banner Signage

Secondly is your on-line efforts. Start by identifying your related vertical markets, the job titles for the decision makers in those markets, and what needs your products or services address.

If you are fortunate like me, the vertical markets are many. So let’s start with just a couple of random examples... boutiques and fitness.

Boutique owners and fitness instructors constantly need to increase their client numbers, and encourage repeat customers. Begin by creating individual landing pages that will appeal to each. I’ve created http://boutique.opend.me and http://fitness.opend.me. Each offers imagery familiar to the visitors and offers messaging that address their needs. They are direct and to the point, quickly presenting the benefits offered by my product. Be sure to include a link to your main site where the visitor can learn more if necessary they prefer.

Seek out discussion forums that relate to your vertical markets and contribute to those forums. Be careful not to just “sell” within the forums as this will likely get you banned. Instead try to add value to the discussion and work a link to your landing page into the discussion. Just being part of the discussion gives you the opportunity to learn about your market and refine your approach, so don’t abuse it.

Next, create a variety of CPC ads within social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ where you can use the on-board audience criteria to narrow who see’s your various ads. In my case I selected variations of “store manager” and “fitness professional” as the respective job title options.

Be sure to create a few ads for each landing page you created, use different messaging in each to see which performs the best. Pick your CPC bids carefully. You don’t want to be at the top of the list as this will result in clicks by people less likely to convert to customers and waste your valuable budget.

So using this method I set my CPC bids from $.20 to $2.75 for the various sites and launched my campaigns. 48 hours later I was able to see which ads were getting more or less impressions, which had the higher click through rates, and ultimately which converted visitors into sign-ups

It’s been less than a week and the sign-ups are starting to trickle in. Nice to see it working.

Expanding and refining this targeted marketing strategy is going to be the order of the day for the foreseeable future. More vertical markets. More landing pages. More ads and forum postings.

In closing I would like to offer my insights to fellow entrepreneurs as I move forward launching Open D Community Builder. Perhaps it will help you in your business development.

If you would like to be kept up to date on the progress of this “hours old” targeted marketing campaign and what I learn as I go, please join me through my site and select the “Modern Marketing” subject of interest.

All the best everyone.

Ross