The Simple Tool That Can Maximize Your Multichannel Communications Campaign
For any marketing professional, these are either the best of times or the worst of times for plying your trade. Communication opportunities are more plentiful than they’ve ever been, which is great news, but along with that glut of marketing channels comes the overwhelming feeling that if you’re not communicating across every possible platform, you’re doing a disservice to your company or your clients. Trigger Systems are a great tool for making sure that you’re making the most of your marketing opportunities.
Wait, what’s a Trigger System, you ask? In simplest terms, a Trigger System is a set of communications and marketing tasks created around a recurring business event, so that you’re always ready to hit the ground running, whether the event is planned or not. And Trigger Systems are supremely flexible, adapting to whatever your communication needs are, so you can set up a Trigger System for situations as different as launching a new product, running a retail campaign or attending a trade show.
It’s a pretty simple idea, but once you think through and document your communications roadmap, you can use it again and again. Just think about how helpful it would be to have a clear, replicable set of PR and marketing tasks that are “triggered” every time your company attends a trade show.
Below are examples of three very different situations where Trigger Systems can help you maximize your multichannel marketing potential. To help illustrate the usefulness and flexibility of this tool, these examples will all be based around a company that’s launching a new beverage in a new, but high-growth beverage category.
Launching a New Beverage
You’ve put in the work of researching the market for your new beverage, creating a great product and developing a brand that you’re confident will resonate with your target customer. Now, you need people to listen and act! A Trigger System for a product launch could include everything from creating press releases and pay-per-click social media and search ad campaigns to creating in-store promotional materials and researching and securing guest articles and backlinks from well-respected beverage publications and taste-making blogs and websites — and anything else that you think will get your product in front of the right eyes! And the best part? When you launch the three other beverages you have planned for next year, you can use the same set of tasks to develop those launch campaigns!
Getting More Out of Your Online Retail Campaign
Many of your potential customers are encountering your new beverage through online channels, and rather than providing a call to action that requires them to visit a physical store, you’re hoping to kickstart sales with an online retail campaign that will bring your beverage right to people’s front doors. When you create a Trigger System, you can think through all the possible avenues for communicating this message, encompassing pay-per-click and remarketing ads, drip email campaigns, a retail splash page on your website, creative product partnerships and more.
Making Noise at a Trade Show
Trade shows are a great way to make a splash with a new product, generating lots of good buzz, making important industry connections and driving big sales orders. Trigger Systems are perfectly suited to trade shows because they can help you create a template that you can use every single time you attend a show. This could include purchasing ads on the show’s website and program, sending invitations to prospects, curating a press list and inviting publications and bloggers to samples and interviews with company leaders, a trade show-specific landing page on your website, refreshed marketing collateral and — of course — a show-stopping new booth design.
Especially when you are launching a new product and building a new business, Trigger Systems can help you create the communications infrastructure that will allow you to execute creative and tactical communications campaigns effectively and seamlessly across as many different channels as possible.
Mike Schaffer is the CEO of Echo-Factory, Inc. Throughout the course of his career, Mike has provided strategic oversight and executive leadership for companies looking to position their businesses for growth, acquisition or both. Mike is an ongoing contributor to CSQ Magazine and a regular speaker at marketing conventions, and mentors start-ups with the USC incubator and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. He also organizes the largest Innovation Group in Los Angeles which meets weekly in Pasadena.
