In an increasingly competitive environment, brands must think outside the box to continue promoting themselves effectively. While most think creative branding requires the utilization of up and coming technologies and marketing channels, in reality, the simplest techniques can have an equally powerful effect.
Take for example a new initiative mobileStorm launched recently to promote its new whitepapers. Simple banners were created for each whitepaper and are being promoted on MobileMarketingWatch.com — a leading news and information blog spanning the mobile marketing and advertising space. Instead of simply placing the banners on the homepage and in specific posts, mobileStorm is targeting Mobile Marketing Watch readers via its RSS feed and daily digest newsletter emails.
In doing so, we start with a highly targeted mobile audience of roughly 5,000 RSS subscribers, of which over 2,000 subscribe to the newsletter — which emails a daily digest of the day’s articles every weekday using Feedburner — in addition. Whitepaper banners were placed in the footer of each and every post in the RSS feed, meaning anytime an MMW post is published, a mobileStorm whitepaper banner is attached to the footer and viewable through any feed reader. Additionally, the same whitepaper banners were placed between posts in the daily newsletter sent via Feedburner, creating the potential for tens of thousands of daily impressions for each banner.
Like most blogs, most of MMW’s content is consumed via the RSS feed, so the potential for conversion is much higher than promoting the same banners on the site itself. With the banners in place, a strategy was put in place internally to track impressions, conversions and leads to mobileStorm. Each banner is routed to a specific landing page that includes a simple form for users to fill out before downloading the whitepaper. When those forms are filled out, the data flows into mobileStorm’s B2B marketing platform Marketo, which then sends the data as leads into Salesforce. Once in Salesforce, all leads are tracked in a pipeline all the way to close to help track and monitor ROI of the entire process.
Though simple in nature, the strategy should go along way in creating valuable leads. This one simple campaign has the potential to reach the same size audience that would have otherwise taken a long time to build from the ground up. In leveraging MMW’s highly targeted and relevant content and readership via RSS, mobileStorm is able to capture potential leads and direct them into the internal sales process via a completely automated campaign.