Leverage Marketing: Converting “Holiday Good Cheer” into Effective “Marketing Messages”

Why not take the opportunity to convert seasonal benchmarks, such as the “holiday season” into marketing opportunities? And that’s precisely the tact taken on behalf of one of Tennessee’s leading chiropractors who, at the last minute, decided to send a “holiday newsletter” to his clients. Converting “holiday good cheer” into marketing messages is a prime example of squeezing every bit of opportunity out of your communications strategy through the use of “leverage marketing.”

On December 8^th, Dr. Louis Obersteadt, the former multi-year president of the Tennessee Chiropractic Association and a distinguished two-time recipient as “Chiropractor of the Year,” decided he wanted a holiday newsletter. The case study below reflects the strategies deployed to maximize this singular marketing effort as a platform to create multiple marketing opportunities.

The Original/Primary Assignment: Create a Holiday Newsletter.

A big yawn and ho-hum is pretty much the way we can mostly characterize seasonal communications with customers, clients or prospects. The majority of snail-mailed post cards are generic “seasonal greetings” dripping with mundane off-the-shelf sentiment designed at best to be “warm and fuzzy.” Rarely, do you find a “call-to-action” and even less frequently does a “holiday card” strike such a resonant chord with the recipient that they can’t wait to not only share that unsolicited missive with family or friends, but even better, leave them anxious to make their next appointment.

The above was the self-imposed challenge the agency faced in creating this distinguished doctor’s newsletter. Click here to see the “snail mail” version of the Holiday Newsletter.

The Result: The most challenging task as marketers is to create a communications message that truly connects with customers, a message that makes them smile, one that is light and fun yet relevant, resonant and even humorous. If you can make people smile, or laugh, and gently, or subtly imbed your “sales message” it is arguably the most effective and powerful marketing approach. This goal was exceedingly accomplished. View the snail-mail version of the Holiday Newsletter.

Here’s what Dr. Obersteadt had to say about the “Holiday Newsletter”:

Jeff, I am very pleased with your incredible imagination! Thanks, Dr. Louis Obersteadt

Leverage Step 2: From Snail-Mail to Email

Finding ways to squeeze multiple uses out of your “marketing materials” is simply smart marketing. So the very next tactic we employed, as well as being extremely cost efficient for the client, was to reproduce the snail-mail newsletter into an email version. By simply reformatting the snail-mail version of the mailed print version of the newsletter, we were able to double up and reinforce our message to the doctor’s patients, increasing our “impressions” while reducing our cpm. Click here to see the email version of the email holiday card.

Leverage Step 3: The Press Release

Here’s where it gets pretty juicy, creative and fun. We decided to augment the holiday newsletter with some “practical holiday tips” and converted it into a potentially newsworthy press release. After all, the news media are always looking for “unique and interesting” holiday/seasonal-tie’in’s and stories. So, the approach we would take to the media would provide a consumer tie-in with the holiday season, best reflected in the following pitch line:  “A Dozen Helpful and Healthy Ways to Shop During the Holidays without Putting A Crimp in Your Christmas or Your Back.” The goal was to get the attention of news editors in Nashville, TN with a  Subject Line  in Outbound Emails to the Nashville media that read: “Correct Shopping Posture: Don’t Let Christmas Shopping Put a Crimp in your Shopping or your Back this Holiday Season.”

Click Here to See the Press Release

The Result: Media Success

The agency was engaged less than two weeks prior to Christmas Day. Clearly a short fuse and for all practical purposes an impossibly truncated time-line to get anything meaningful done, especially as the media is concerned, during this pressure-packed time period.  The fact is, news media stories require ramp and nurturing, especially if it isn’t a “hard news story.” And yet, despite these challenges, the “story” caught the attention of the editor of the Nashville Business Journal and was reproduced in whole in the Belle Meade Community Newspaper website (the newspaper being a weekly, the deadline had passed and no other issue was being “printed” until after the new year).

Critical PostScript & Important Public Relations Advice: News releases are intended to accomplish the following goals:

1. Create interest in an editor (print or electronic media) about doing a “stand alone” news piece about your client (the subject of the release/story).
2. A “story” may be picked up in whole, or in part.
3. Other times a news release will trigger interest on behalf of the news media who will use “your news release” as a starting point to do another version or slant of a story they think is more fitting for their reader/viewer/audience. In this case, a client might be the sole subject of a story, but more often they are one part or one source, of whatever this “larger story” might be.
4. Other times a “story” might fit in to some other notion or idea that is already “in the hopper” or in the “mindset” of an editor/writer/reporter.

Our media success was an example of the fourth scenario noted above.

The Nashville Business Journal

The editor of the Nashville Business Journal was, at the time of the story/release submission, working on a story about “marketing efforts on behalf of businesses’ in the face of a changing and declining business climate.” Dr. Obersteadt was quoted and featured in this story.

The Marketing Machine in Full Swing

So, what happens next with this media success? The principle of Leverage Marketing is further amplified below:

• A reprint of the article(s) will be posted to the Doctor’s website.
• At the Doctor’s discretion, a snail-mail version of a letter, along with a photo copy of the article will be mailed to his patients.
• Additionally and alternatively, an outbound (email) letter will be sent to his patients, which contain a link to the Doctor’s website where a copy of the “article” will live that proudly announces this recent “news” accomplishment.

Conclusion: The Big Payoff

Having established “contacts and connections” with the media in his market, going forward this first small but successful round of media exposure significantly enhances future opportunities to promote the doctor to media editors in his market.

The process of creating “branding” and implementing “name recognition” among the media is invaluable in advancing story ideas in the future. Just as with consumers, it takes time (frequency and reach) to establish “credibility and value” with customers; the media are no different. This (initial) marketing strategy and public relations approach has opened the doors for further dialogue with media.

Building Strategic Alliances: When the Economy is in the “Crapper,” Now, More than Ever!

Basically, the economy is in the crapper, on the whole things are just not good. Business is down, and off, pretty much everywhere, across all categories and sectors.

Something has got to give and usually its jobs. Maybe even your job. But before you stress yourself into a paralytic, paranoia frenzy (which never helps job performance anyway) there are a few things you could, and should, understand about what is going on with the market, how you can (potentially) deal with the big issues here, and how creating and building strategic alliances can be the answer to all that ails you.

Make Sure You Leave the Stapler

Let’s start with the basics, but we’ll rapidly ramp up and get to the point. There are two ways companies remain profitable. They make money selling their goods and/or services, and secondly, they reduce expenses. The quickest and cleanest way to reduce expenses is to lay people off. Doesn’t matter how gently you use that phrase, you get laid off, you are FIRED – goodbye, ta ta, or as they say in the world of Instant messaging – c ya later. And, oh by the way, make sure you leave the stapler too.

By reducing expenses through staff reduction, a company feels the impact directly and immediately on the ‘bottom line.”

What to do to stop the Bleeding?

When a company tries to cut production expenses that takes or can take much longer; meaning the company is still bleeding losses while R & D tries to figure out how to make the “product” more cheaply while still retaining the quality, value and features on which it has built its name, brand and reputation. Do we replace the steel with plastic, do we replace the plastic with tin-foil, do we replace the tin-foil with Saran Wrap? These are all critical production questions that take time to investigate.

Hey, Where’s Blake and Tiffany?

So, let’s concentrate on the former method of reducing expenses – cutting personnel. People go first because it is a clear “line item” expense cut. Let Blake or Tiffany go on Monday, you see that cost/salary savings on Friday when accounting makes payroll. Bean counter 1 to bean counter 2 in payroll: “Hey, where’s Blake, I have his check?” Bean counter 2: “oh, they let him go.” Bean Counter 1: “Oh, okay, I guess the bleeding’s stopped.” Bean Counter 2; Yup, everyone’s safe now, at least for this week. Bean Counter 1: I hope he didn’t take the stapler. Bean Counter 2; Oh, you mean like Tiffany did, last week? Direction: Bean counters now snort the way bean counters snort.

As you can see, this is clean and simple, and it makes sense, so long as you are not Blake or Tiffany, and naturally life is back to normal in the Bean-Counter department.

Hey, Guess who’s Picking up the Slack?

When personnel are let go to save costs and reduce expenses it has a serious and deleterious dramatic psychological impact on people, and of course the company as a whole, as you were able to see by the histrionic exchange between Bean Counter 1 and Bean Counter 2. Despite their crazy bean-counter antics, whether you are management, or you’re down the line staff, the remaining personnel must pick up the slack and responsibilities left void from Blake and Tiffany clearing their desks and hitting the bricks.

This puts more pressure on managers and all other department personnel, if there are actually any other department personnel left, who might be fortunate enough to retain their jobs, which naturally everyone is grateful for. Let’s listen to the hushed buzz-banter around the water cooler among the few tremulous remaining employees.

Disgruntled Employee 1: “Gee, can you believe how much frickin’ work we’re doing? Disgruntled Employee 2: “Yeah, I know, like what the hell man, they’re working us like we’re in India making sneakers for Nike for 8 cents an hour.” Disgruntled Employee 1: “I wonder where Blake and Tiffany ended up?” Disgruntled Employee 2: “Yeah, me too, I’ll text him now.”

Where did Blake and Tiffany End Up?

If this situation has happened to you, where cut-backs, layoffs and rampant firings have run-amuck through the hallways of your company on a Bloody Friday, and you’re fortunate enough to have dodged another bullet, then you gotta know you’re working a whole lot harder than Blake or Tiffany, and they’re probably a whole lot happier than you are too serving lattes.

So, this is the cycle of human behavior. First relief, “man, am I glad I didn’t get canned,” to “wow, I can’t believe I am working my a#$ off for the same lousy pay and am doing Blake and Tiffany’s jobs too!”

Ta Da, Strategic Alliance to the Rescue

If you, or your company find yourself in this kind of situation, like laying off Blake and Tiffany, and a host of other people whose names you might not recall at this minute but that you know made your life easy, better and whose work was of true value to you, your department and the company at large, and if you find yourself totally stressing out about how you’re going to get this next major project done, then there is a solution so easy you will smack yourself in the forehead like Homer Simpson and go, “Doh.”

And that answer is, Building Strategic Alliances.

You, my friend, are a perfect candidate for a Strategic Alliance. Why? Well, a few reasons. First the concept of strategic alliance is simply to have on call, a vendor relationship with someone — a person, a company, to whom you can outsource the kinds of work, the kinds of services you need.

In our worlds of advertising, marketing, communications, media, public relations, copywriting, graphic design, web design, etc., there are a host of companies who can provide you these services. It might be one company, it might be many, but you can get them for sure.

Some can do all of these – the copywriting, the design, the film and video production, web design and development and so on, and others can do just some of these. But the big idea here is that you are very likely to be able to find someone to fill in this need. There’s a good chance you can get someone to actually work there, in your office, or they can work “off-site” to do this work. The good news is, you are covered, and that’s gotta be a big relief.

Fabulous For You, You Get Great Work, Without The Expense and Stress of an Employee

This is fabulous for you, and your company, because now you can bring in not just fresh talent and new creative eye-balls to give you an entirely new and unimpeded perspective, totally devoid of politics also, but think about it, you don’t have to pay any of the high costs of maintaining this employee.

They’re not a permanent employee, for that matter they’re not even a part-time employee, they are a 1099 outside contract vendor. Heck you don’t even have to worry where they’re gonna park if they come to your office, all you know is that they just show up and do good work. And just think, best of all, you can stick them where Blake or Tiffany used to work. Pretty convenient, huh.

And after all, isn’t that what you need right now, a little help. Or, maybe even a lot of help. And of course, you want it to be darn good work to, and chances are you’ll be able to get really really good talent to provide you with really good work and help you get all those projects done that are stressing you out, along with the rest of the few people that remain in your department.

So, forget about Blake and Tiffany, they’re history and have moved on, but if you’re looking for really good talent to do really good work and help you through some tough times, then consider a Strategic Alliance, and the buzz around the water cooler will be much healthier.

Call 954-801-8263 for more information on a Strategic Alliance with TheBambooAgency.com.