In December of 2007 we ran an integrated marketing campaign focused on Consumer Electronics Show exhibitors. The results were phenomenal. In the three days of the show, we had our sales team working non-stop after the campaign led to 40 meetings with potential clients. Here are the details of why we were so successful, and the details that led to our Hermes Creative Award.
The Right Targets
Walker Sands has a long history of successful marketing with innovative technology companies. Last year we had 11 of our clients nominated for the Chicago Innovation Awards and we already had several clients exhibiting at CES. Anyone exhibiting at CES would be a good target for us and so we focused the campaign accordingly.
Post Card Introduction
After we had our list of exhibitors, we launched two postcards sent a week apart from each other. The focus was on PR services to help attract media attention during CES, but since we launched so close to the show our true goal was to set appointments for future projects.
Our headlines focused on getting the media attention needed for a successful show, “Over 4,500 Reporters and 2,000 Bloggers are Covering CES. What Are You Going to Say?” On the reverse side our text promoted two offers, a hard offer and a softer, fall back offer.
Our hard offer prompted readers to call us for a free media consultation to help prepare for the CES. Those who didn’t want to commit to phone conversation with our consultants were presented with a softer offer to visit our CES microsite for additional information and to download our CES Media Readiness Kit.
CES Microsite
Those who didn’t want the consultation were directed to visit our CES prep center at www.walkersands.com/CES. On the site we had an overview of our firm, a list of all our clients that proved our experience, a case study on a client CES debut last year, and a media checklist to help prepare for this year’s CES.
Media Checklist
We took the time to figure out what had worked for us in previous years and designed a CES Media Checklist. The result was a very nice piece that should be helpful to anyone exhibiting at future shows. We had tremendous feedback on this piece as it proved to be useful for many of the people our sales team met with.
Calling Campaign
Once the cards had been sent we closed the loop with phone calls. Sales Generation Systems, a firm we use for calling campaigns, followed up with a large percentage of the U.S. exhibitors, to make sure they had received our earlier communications and attempt to set meetings for our team at the show.
Results
In the end each piece of the campaign served to drive business for Walker Sands. We had direct calls about the free media consultation, visits to the microsite generated additional interest, and the calling campaign revealed good recall amongst recipients and led to the majority of our set appointments at the show.
This is a template for success that we’ve duplicated in varying ways for our clients so it’s nice to be recognized by Hermes for this particular success. I’m proud of the beautiful pieces we designed, but more so for the 40 appointments and the resulting sales generated by the campaign.
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