Marketing on a Wish and a Prayer Part 4: Drip marketing and the touch process

Author: Rachel Durkan Category: B2B, B2C, Marketing Date: October 5, 2018

The most successful marketing strategies are targeted, focused, and engage a successful touch process. In fact, studies have shown that it takes between seven and 11 touches to reach an audience and gain their trust. A touch can be an email, direct mail, web banner, website visit, or other method of getting your business in front of your target audience. Every marketing touch must reinforce the core business message; if it doesn’t, the touch process is broken, and the potential sale is lost.

In this final part of a four-part series, adapted and excerpted from “Marketing on a Wish and a Prayer,” written by Paradigm’s Founder and President, Rachel Durkan, as part of Lessons Beyond the Obvious, we’ll highlight the importance of utilizing drip marketing to encourage an effective touch process.

Replacing the Spaghetti Approach with Strategic Drip Marketing

Alice is a successful, award-winning marketing consultant to Fortune 100 companies. But after 20 years in the big leagues, she was ready for a career change. Alice wanted to leverage her vast marketing expertise with the opportunity to embrace her entrepreneurial spirit, and after several months of research she purchased a children’s daycare franchise.

In choosing the franchise model, Alice’s plan was to quickly get the business up and running. She would maximize the support offered from the parent company and couple it with her own marketing acumen to create a fairly self-sustaining operation that required little oversight on her part. She was so confident in this venture and her ability to quickly achieve her ROI, she financed it with her life savings and additional funds pulled from her retirement accounts.

Alice channeled her Fortune 100 experience into a marketing plan centered on advertising. She spent more than $10,000 dollars per month on five different advertising campaigns, which were executed by five separate advertising/media agencies.

To her surprise, Alice’s advertising blitz was not delivering the desired returns. Although she was attracting new customers, she needed to double the amount of new business to meet her goal of breaking even at two years, and then double it again to meet her revenue goals.

Alice hired a local marketing agency to get an objective opinion on her failing advertising efforts, and it was immediately apparent to the agency that there were no clear, consistent messages between the five advertising campaigns. In fact, each campaign had different messaging and positioning; none of them worked together or fed off each other, and in many cases, there were mixed messages being sent.

To the marketing agency, it seemed Alice had thrown a set of ideas at the wall and hoped one would stick – known as the “spaghetti approach.” This method of trial and error may be a time-honored practice for multinational companies with ample marketing budgets to test advertising concepts, messages, and positioning; but for small business, when the money spent on these disparate advertising campaigns is your entire marketing budget, it leaves little wiggle room for error.

And so, the marketing agency helped Alice create a comprehensive small-business drip marketing strategy driven by a series of touches. The agency introduced enhanced guerilla marketing strategies to Alice’s niche audiences, fine-tuned the daycare’s positioning, and launched extremely targeted outreach campaigns. Considerably less expensive than Alice’s media blitz, these coordinated touches – a series of messages that were designed to “drip” in front of Alice’s target audience over time – required strategic planning and the creation of a marketing funnel. With a cohesive, comprehensive strategy in which each marketing touch supported the next, Alice was able to build her daycare’s awareness and reputation.

After six months, Alice was once again on her projected growth track. Her stress levels decreased as the daycare enrollment increased; and although she now recognizes and embraces the challenges of entrepreneurship, she understands the route is not as easy as she anticipated.

The Lesson

Getting Alice to think like a small business, to think like a parent instead of an executive, and to think locally rather than globally were keys to her ultimate success. Alice now has renewed confidence that she can achieve her goals.

Although the best motivational speakers encourage us all to “THINK BIG,” we at Paradigm Marketing and Design encourage clients to “embrace small.” It can be just as exciting and even more rewarding.

For help creating your own small-scale, hyper-targeted drip marketing campaign, contact us today to schedule a consultation.

This is the fourth part of a four-part series, adapted and excerpted from Marketing on a Wish and a Prayer, written by Paradigm’s Founder and President, Rachel Durkan.

The full chapter is available for download here.