Mike Kyle from Pace, we recently decided that we needed to coordinate our marketing effort and really strategize of how to  bring a cross-channel campaign that would really demonstrate that we could walk the talk and to do that we looked at a number of different things and actually one of the things that we looked at we saw here at Podi  from a company out of Norway called Huntsa Press where they had customized and created a personalized magazine that they were sending out to their clients and their prospects really demonstrating the power of variable data and some of the other things.  

We wanted to take that to, I think, a little bit higher level and wanted to really integrate all of the different components of a cross-media campaign to really demonstrate how that could be very synergistic or core of a marketing concept for us, so what we decided to do is to take this magazine concept.  We acquired content from an outside source and created a very professional looking magazine and branded it to our operation, but more importantly what we did is we printed the entire magazine on the digital press.  That allowed us to do a number of things.  One, it allowed us to personalize it, which is a typical type of VDP type of operation, but more importantly it allowed us to use the data that we had in our CRM to really segment the audience and deliver content and advertisements directly to those people in a relevant and very specific way and instead of segmenting by let’s say a vertical or some kind of thing, specific business we kind of categorized it into more of a business to business, business to consumer, nonprofit, education, design agency, etcetera.  That allowed us to speak the language and use the terms that those particular business categories like to use.  For instance for a nonprofit we’re going to use the words membership, donor and those kinds of things, whereas a business to business we’re going to use a lot more things such as event promotion, traffic generation, lead generation, product awareness, service awareness, whatever it might be to really discuss the kinds of offerings that we want to provide. 

In doing that we also took the response mechanisms and surrounded the magazine so that there could be a real traction of, and a measurement of how that segmentation was working and how the piece itself as a marketing tool was working for us, so one of the first things we did is we put a BRM, a business reply mail subscription card in and we segmented that into prospects and to existing accounts because we wanted to ask again different kinds of questions, whereas the account questions were more of an engagement, can we get you into the newsletter, is there more information on this particular service, whereas the prospect was much more introductory, a lot less intrusive to say have you heard of a cross-channel campaign before, have you seen this kind of thing and would you like to meet with.  So what that did is it allowed us to quickly identify what the next step was so that we could automate that response or that follow-up that needed to happen.

The other thing that we did and very important component was we created an online component, an online website specifically for that magazine, so as you are in the magazine you wanted to see more about the magazine.  Perhaps you wanted to see the magazine in a digital form.  Perhaps you wanted to subscribe online.  You were able to do that online and again on the landing of the subscription it would ask you are you an account, are you a prospect kind of thing that would direct you to the right survey questions.  On top of that we then flooded our social media, our Twitter, our Facebook, our LinkedIn with descriptions and comments on articles that were in the magazine as well as our own internal email newsletter, commented on articles again that were in the magazine reiterating them, not talking too much about them, but really kind of getting people interested into finding out more, wanting to get that magazine, wanting to engage. 

The whole purpose of this really was an awareness campaign to get people aware of who were are, to get them interested, engaged, maybe participate more in our social media, definitely come to that content website of the magazine website and in doing this we put out about 700 or so magazines.  We were able to reach four subscribers within the first half an hour of our Friday, our newsletter that went out and immediately get two meetings requests from that first subscription and then the subscription cards and the online subscriptions started coming in.  We have automation that actually happens, so if they asked for a certain thing.  There may be an automated fulfillment of a PDF.  There might be a personalized brochure describing that particular interest that might go out to them.  Definitely there is an automated email that goes immediately to them acknowledging that they have subscribed and that there will be some type of follow-up from either a representative or from some type of automated types of information.

This really helped us demonstrate all of the different components of a multimedia campaign and really demonstrated how to integrate these components together and the results were incredible for us.  It really created a serious lead generation tool.  It has been a fantastic awareness campaign for us and we’re really looking forward to the next issue.