Mad 4 Blog

At Mad 4 Marketing, we’re always wary of resorting to gimmicks when we’re building a campaign for your business. Although it can be fun to come up with extremely creative and off-the-wall ideas to help you get the word out, at the end of the day these brainstorming sessions are often best just to get the juices flowing and then can be scaled back to more reasonable ideas. But that’s not always the case. For example, guerrilla marketing endeavors can be classified as marketing stunts. These are often a popular and practical way to catch consumers’ attention and make a lasting impression. The important thing is knowing the distinction between what will work and what’s over the top. This takes the discretion of a knowledgeable advertising agency with a diverse skill set, from traditional to avant garde media and marketing applications.

One of the main reasons for concern is that marketing stunts are unpredictable. Since you’re ideally seeking a one-of-a-kind event or attraction, this means there’s no way to know entirely what to expect. There aren’t analytics to see how successful a similar promotion has been in the past and anticipate its reaction with the public. However, this doesn’t mean that it can’t be done correctly. It just means that it’s very important to estimate cost (in terms of money and time) vs. reward, and make sure everyone involved understands and approves the plan so that expectations are aligned. Nailing key messaging throughout the course of the event is vital, since once of the key pitfalls to avoid with marketing stunts is burying relevant ideas within the framework of comedy, outlandishness or absurdism just to make an impact. At the very least, if a stunt doesn’t go over as well as you’d hoped, it’s good to know that the brand’s name and core essence do get out.

Product placement is one of those obvious marketing ploys that audiences typically don’t like to see – or don’t like to be aware of, at least. Then again, if it didn’t work it probably wouldn’t be all over your television and movie screens. Morgan Spurlock’s most recent documentary, “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” explores the phenomenon of product placement by interviewing business execs and artists about the growing trend – while simultaneously soliciting the movie to sponsors. He actually makes an interesting point about the gimmick of product placement, however, by noting that he doesn’t consider it selling out because he maintained creative control. Similarly, if you’re going to go for a gimmicky marketing stunt, it’s important that those receiving it feel like it maintains some integrity and is more about addressing them and appealing to them than it is about doing something for your own benefit and bank account.

For more advice about the types of marketing concepts that are most suitable for you, don’t hesitate to contact us for a consultation.

It always makes sense to ask successfully acquired clients and customers how they came to hear about your business. By carefully comparing how well each of your advertising efforts performs, you can bulldoze past a lot of trial-and-error and simply direct your budget toward what works, both in quantitative and qualitative units. For example, if no one’s seen that ad in the newspaper but everyone heard about you from a friend or relative, you may wish to pull your print ads and focus on buzz-generating word-of-mouth campaigns–or even reward former patrons for referring a friend. And if you’re reaching a higher caliber of clientele via brochure than billboard, you’ll certainly want to bring your message down to the smaller scale, which can also cut back cost.

These days, tracking is everything when it comes to building successful campaigns. Online, it’s perfectly easy to determine how a person landed on your page; analytics mark each click-through by its referring links, search engine source, browser type and even the viewer’s physical location—it’s not only effortless, but also automatically built into most website content management systems. But even online there’s always more you can do; when it comes to e-commerce, many shopping outlets utilize codes. Asking buyers to enter a code before they take advantage of a sale helps marketers to track which sales and campaigns were more successful than others, and to help determine if shoppers heard about it from a newsletter, referral or ad. This is why you might see several usable codes available for the same sale, depending on where you hear about it.

In what other ways can coding and tracking be used in your business endeavors? Mad 4 Marketing recently posted job listings on several career search websites. But each posting required us to pay a fee, and since we weren’t sure which websites or which wording would be most successful for attracting the best new teammate, we decided to generate a few different ads. We asked job candidates on each board and posting to reply with a different subject line. This took a little more time and thought, but we were able to see from where we were getting hits, and what kind of prospective employees were nipping the bait. After the first week we cut our ad placement (and cost!) in half and only used phrasing that was clearly expressing our desires to the most qualified candidates.

Another example is Satori’s text message campaign. In 2008, we used a lot of on-the-scene guerrilla marketing to advertise for the newly opening apartment rental community in Fort Lauderdale. We wanted to reach out to those who already lived in and loved the surrounding area of South Florida. At each event (such as street fairs, art shows and the boat parade), we advertised the chance to win six months’ free rent by texting a code to a given phone number. At each event, the code differed. That way, we could see which community event had directed the most participants to our giveaway, as well as which regions or crowds were most interested in Satori. This information turned out to be extremely valuable in later marketing endeavors, such as choosing local ad placement.

The bottom line is that tracking efforts are a smart investment in the future. It means looking past today’s brochure or even tomorrow’s website, toward next year’s entire marketing strategy. Tracking provides you with the tools to always understand and surpass prior tactics–and no matter what, this means that you will ultimately succeed.