We can lend wings to your marketing, and spurs to your sales.

Are you
having
lead flow
problems?

The 90-Day Blitz offers
a solution to such problems as branding weakness, inadequate lead flow, poor market visibility, the challenge of meeting quarterly numbers, a need to unify sales and marketing into speaking with one voice, and an ability to eliminate the inefficiency of the random task–
or fragmented media approach–
to media planning … for which Keith Bates developed his Marcom Engine process more than twenty years ago.

Solutions

The (updated) 90-Day Blitz

For Sales and Marketing execs we offer a solution to the twin problems of low market awareness and inadequate lead flow. It is typically used to sustain a word of mouth, viral marketing/influencer-based product launch or lead generation effort.

The 90 Day Blitz (for twenty years the hottest service offered by Keith Bates & Associates, Inc.) will be available September 1, 2009 in an updated version following a two year hiatus and steep learning curve into social media. Bates, and a large team, spent two years designing, building and launching their social network, and learned a great deal in the process…the hard way. The site, focused on adventure travel for outdoor enthusiasts can be visited at www.myadventures.com. The original 90 Day Blitz, a guaranteed lead generation process supported by wining creative, was developed by Keith Bates, founder of Keith Bates & Associates, Inc. over many years.

WHAT IS A 90 DAY BLITZ?
It’s a multimedia, lead generation activity based on response compression techniques. It is a fully integrated 3 month program that combines word of mouth, viral marketing, and CGM (consumer generated media)  with traditional media (email, print, direct mail, telemarketing, etc.) to create a sense of event, which in turn produces a substantial flow of leads in a very short time with minimal commitment of financial resources. Typically it uses 3 to 5 media vehicles to present your message to prospects over a week to ten day period at the beginning of each of three months. A note of caution: It typically takes 90 days to develop the Blitz program so that a strategy begun in September will be ready for a January 1 launch--which is traditionally the best time of the year to start either a direct marketing or branding effort. And a further note of caution: While the wealth and complexity of social media is often intimidating to marketers keep in mind that the critical component of any marketing is the message, not the medium. Message development is where Keith Bates & Assoc. Inc. excels.

THE SOURCE --- AND RATIONALE
Why response compression? To quote Ernan Roman, author of Integrated Direct Marketing, "We have found that the traditional sequencing of media does not create the maximum synergy from the media being employed. Specifically, the impressions are conveyed over too long a time period, diluting the impact to a significant degree ... we create a sequence of ongoing contacts, using a variety of media. These are deployed with short, carefully orchestrated intervals between contacts so that we gain a disproportionate share of the prospect's attention. A sense of event is generated -- a feeling that something important is going on. It would be far more difficult, if not impossible to achieve this effect through isolated media. We call this tighter time-frame approach ‘response compression’. By deploying media in an abbreviated time frame, we create an intensified synergy between media that generates much higher response rates."

TYPICAL MEDIA COMPONENTS THAT WLL BE EXPLORED
In the old days (pre Internet) life was easier, and decisions regarding media were simple. For the traditional B2B marketer (who rarely used broadcast) the choices were typically direct mail (letters, postcards), industry-specific response-oriented publications, telemarketing, and occasionally teleconferencing. Broadcast fax was often considered (which, except for unusual situations, is pretty much dead these days).

Today, the choices seem endless, and require constant testing to sort out and separate the winners from the losers. Included in the world of consumer generated media are social networks, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, iPods, webinars, email blasts, voice mail broadcasting,  online white papers, etc. (forgive me if I’ve forgotten any), plus the processes for their employment which embraces the many disciplines of word of mouth and viral marketing. Plus some of the traditional stuff still works. Direct mail is still effective. Print publications serving vertical markets still work but in a different way. Since they are unable to supply the wealth of data on a website they are being used more and more simply to drive traffic to a company’s site. Trade shows are still effective as is PR (which is morphing daily into buzz or influentials marketing. Plus there are endless technical issues to consider not the least of which are SEO and SEM. The power of the Internet is growing daily…and you need to keep up with new opportunities.

THE GREATER IMPORTANCE OF THE MESSAGE
That old cliché of  “It’s the medium, not the message” is not so true anymore, although social network propagators want to believe so.
While there are endless ways to get your story into circulation, what you say still counts. The Creativity module, third and last module of our Marcom Engine planning process is where the message development begins. The Marcom Engine is described in detail elsewhere in this site. It consists of two key components: core intelligence & theme/image standards. This is the mixing bowl where the ingredients provided by the audit and strategy modules become core intelligence, and are blended with raw creative power to produce THE BIG IDEA (lightning bolt) which is the source of all communications energy and the basis for our theme/image standards.

We develop “big ideas” for your communications execution and share with you the creative process. Marcom planning and producing are great, but without the “big idea” you’re only halfway there. Technology marketing is a special challenge to the creative effort because of the diversity of benefits and the complex audience matrix involved. To succeed we look for stopping power but not at the sacrifice of relevancy to both product and corporate branding issues. To quote David Ogilvy, famed founder and creative head of Ogilvy & Mather advertising, “You can do your homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas.”  You can also explore Better Creative in much greater detail from a link on our Solutions page.

BLITZ GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

• Goals include sales acceleration, increased market awareness
• Objectives focus on rapid generation of quality leads, improved cycle time
• The challenge is to do this quickly, and within a reasonable budget.

SALES/MARKETING PROBLEMS THAT OFTEN PROMPT
THE BLITZ STRATEGY

• Poor response levels to marketing communications efforts
• Return on investment of marketing dollars poor, or not measurable
• Cost of sales too high caused by ineffective media strategies
• Long cycle times due to low market awareness, bad positioning
• Too slow to market with marketing messages
• Quarterly, annual sales goals not being met

COMMON MISTAKES THAT LEAD TO THESE PROBLEMS

• Using a Random Task Approach resulting from confusion over which media to adopt.
• Searching for a painless solution--Silver Bullet doesn’t exist.
• Engineering-driven cultures rather than Customer-driven.
• Inability to speak with a Single Voice; result is garbled message.
• Impatience/Lack of Testing/ Poor Accountability Procedures
• Attitude that sales generates dollars, marketing consumes them.
• Failure to find a Lightning Bolt ... or Big Idea that reaches the "feeling" side of your prospects. Selling the steak, not the sizzle (selling features not benefits)

AND A FEW MORE

• Failure to know your market/competition
• Slow launches ... caused by failure to run marcom process concurrent with beta
• Weak responses to competitors attacks
• Inability to accurately target your audiences.
• Failure to understand your markets positioning environment.
• Failure to build cross-functional teams to manage marcom as advocated by Business Process Reengineering.