Integrated Marketing Plan

Mexican fast food chain Del Taco took its Facebook fan base from roughly 20,000 to nearly 60,000 in just seven weeks after launching their Facebook-based "The Del Taco Super Special Show".   

Del Taco vice president of marketing John Cappasola says that their new, multiplatform marketing approach will hopefully help to broaden their customer base. "Looking at our position in the category, it's important that we find ways to extend our reach as efficiently as possible," Cappasola says. "We knew that integrating what we were doing—a traditional media approach—with social media was going to be really important for us."

The QSR brand is continually monitoring impressions, click-throughs and other metrics and using that information to tweak their placement of online and social media ads for the show, as well as the creative and offers featured.  For example, online ads are now relying on both coupons AND viral tools to encourage current fans to recruit their friends and family to become Del Taco Facebook fans.

Great to see that the Mexican chain is also using Twitter to promote the show and other special offers/coupons. It is great to see how tightly their complete franchise marketing plan seems to be tied together. (They are incorporating shoutouts to their Facebook page (specifically to The Del Taco Super Special Show") in numerous media forms (radio, tv, print, etc.)

While Del Taco is relatively late to the game with Facebook, they are proving that even for for a late-adopter, social networking can greatly impact one's franchise marketing strategy and local internet marketing efforts!

Note:  This post originally appeared on the old Balihoo blog on 01/26/09

Balihoo’s Director of Media Buying Katie Bergerud wrote the below article for the Idaho Statesman’s ‘Starting Up’ series early last year. Katie shares her abundant knowledge and provides useful information for any local business trying to determine how to market during this formidable economic time.

Read her full article here:

Starting Up: Tough Times are the Right Time for an Integrated Marketing Plan

Originally Published: February 26, 2009

One of my favorite mantras is, “The greatest fortunes are made in down markets.” A reason for this is that as an economy decelerates, the cost of goods and services required to build a company correspondingly decreases. Among these costs are the media space and advertising services required to market your company.

Savvy marketers know that during a recession, their competitors will reduce marketing expenses, thereby creating an opportunity to grab market share at a relatively low cost. While advertising costs are down today, over the past few years media options have grown exponentially and become more sophisticated. So you should take this downturn as an opportunity to refurbish your marketing strategy.

My company, Balihoo, offers software and services that allow franchisees to market locally. We have a bird’s-eye view of marketing trends and a wealth of experience helping companies leverage the down market to boost sales.

There is no universal marketing strategy that I can advocate. Every company has to reach different audiences and offer varying messages, thus you will need to develop your own plan. However, I can offer one general approach in light of this economy and the modern advertising tools you have at your disposal: Build an integrated marketing plan, negotiate the heck out of it, measure performance, and adjust your media mix accordingly.

Now is the time to build a marketing plan that uses multiple, coordinated advertising media - otherwise known as an integrated plan. You know your demographic best, so select media that give you best access to your target audience. Further, your plan should have clear goals and measurable objectives aligned with your strategy. Ensure you differentiate between brand-building tactics, which should have longer-term objectives and measurements, and direct response tactics, which will yield shorter-term results and different metrics to measure them.

Ad sellers are caught in the same economic pinch as you - they have goals to meet and abundant competition, and they will negotiate. Shop around for the best advertising rates, which may mean exploring new media. For example, even if you’ve never advertised on radio, it doesn’t hurt to see what radio stations are offering. So long as that medium offers adequate access to your demographic, such exploration may lead to a more cost-effective medium.

Build a strategy that puts return on investment first and construct metrics that measure performance. An important first step is to choose media that allow you to measure performance whether it’s through an online tool, report or service offered by the media vendor, or through tactics you implement, like varying phone numbers or referral codes in different ads.

While tracking results by medium is important, with an integrated campaign you’ll need to measure results holistically across all activities to know when one activity might be affecting another. For example, if you are concurrently running Internet and newspaper ads, a significant portion of your leads could come from Web searches people conduct after seeing your newspaper ad. Failing to account for this could make you over-value online advertising and misappropriate ad dollars in the future. Tracking these interactions will be challenging, but to see the whole picture you should combine your per-medium metrics with old-fashioned customer feedback. Ask customers what first drove them to your business.

The advertisement itself is as important as the medium you choose. Whenever possible, test different ads within the same medium to measure which is more effective. As you see different approaches or media winning over others, be ready to reallocate ad dollars to the winning combination. Perhaps the best advice I can give is to stick to your plan despite the recession. By advertising when others aren’t, you will be able to relatively increase your brand awareness, then leverage it to gain even more market share once consumers start to spend again.

Katie Bergerud recently relocated from Seattle to join Balihoo in Boise, where she is director of media buying.

She can be reached at kbergerud@balihoo.com.

Starting Up is a series published on Thursdays. The columns grew from discussions between the Statesman and local tech and entrepreneurial leaders and are coordinated by Julie Howard, a marketing specialist for the Idaho Department of Commerce. Reach her at julie.howard@commerce.idaho.gov.

Is social media measurable? Dell has clearly proven that it is reporting earnings through their @delloutlet Twitter account of $4.5 million since June and a total of $6.5 million over the last couple years. Posting these results is an indicator to all brands that social media has secured its place as an effective, measurable, and cost efficient addition to any integrated marketing plan.

I’ve worked in media for nearly 10 years and one of the best parts of my job is staying on top of new media outlets and what they can offer my clients.  About 5 years ago I was visited by a media sales executive presenting a new publication – The Week

Typically when a new publication is released the circulation is sketchy at best and the editorial can be dismal but this one captured my attention.  The Week was inspired by a briefing developed during the Carter administration to keep the President up to speed on all domestic and international news stories that hit during that week.  It was designed in a way to be read by President Carter in about 45 minutes on short Air Force One flights.  The briefing covered all major stories globally and highlighted coverage from liberal, conservative, and local news outlets to deliver a balanced perspective on the issues covered.  The Week has continued in this format and distills the best of U.S. and Foreign Press into 44 pages and is read by roughly 500,000 readers every week. 

I rarely endorse a media property but this one is worthy of sharing.  If you're in the process of developing a media planning strategy or integrated marketing strategy that hits this demo, it's worth a look.  It is the only news outlet that I read faithfully and without it I would have no idea how The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, and The Al Sabah in Baghdad covered this week’s events in Iraq.  In today’s world of media there is an abundance of politically diverse and passionately unique perspectives covering every story - The Week allows me to sort through it all.  A must read in my opinion.

PR: wait...    I: wait...    L: wait...    LD: wait...    I: wait...   wait...    Rank: wait...    Traffic: wait...    Price: wait...    C: wait...

Note:  This post originally appeared on Balihoo's old blog on 11/12/09 by Kevin Donaldson

In the past couple days I have came across two interesting articles using American football analogies representing typical startup challenges.  One yesterday from Dan Martell entitled Startups: Its ok to change your mind/product, A second post just two days prior by Entrepreneur/Angel Andy Liu on his blog Inspired Startup entitled Dink to Success.  I often use the concept of sports when talking about Agile software development and more generally when discussing business agility so I thought I would add some additional thoughts into the mix.  These certainly apply to the marketing software tools and marketing planning systems we build here at Balihoo. 

First, lets talk about why are sports such as football are great inspiration to startups? – I think it works well because there is a mix of competition, pain and exhilaration in the sport, which is very similar to what you get in a startup environment.  Interestingly, this can be a useful way to help recruit and/or determine the types of people that you want on your startup team.  I don’t mean that you should seek out athletes, but the analogy can help prospects understand what they are signing up for, and help weed out candidates that are not interested in playing the game.  Some people like the idea of being in a startup. but can they play on the field, or are they really just an armchair athlete?

Once you have your team – how can you make your players most effective? The articles listed use the sport of football; however, I actually believe that while football works in some ways the sport of rugby might be a superior analogy in many respects.  Both games have similar objectives but with some key differences. 

 

Here are a few examples:

Pads and Helmets:  Unlike American football there are no pads or helmets in rugby.  Having this type of safety gear can create the impression of indestructibility.  Just put your head down and go.  Without pads and helmets for protection it might drive a different type of behavior – is there a smoother way for us to move the ball forward?  Plus, if you make the comparison that pads/helmet = cash you are likely lucky to have a jersey:)

Defined Plays - the good:  Executing a defined play can be a good analogy in a startup if used in the right context.  For example in most Agile software shops teams will ‘huddle’ each morning to set out a plan for the day and then resets again the next day based on the results of the previous days play.  Another good use of this model relates to frequent resets and huddles on business strategy.  However the longer the duration between huddles the more this analogy starts to breaks down.

Defined Plays – the bad:  At a macro/business level I think this analogy can actually decrease agility.  Plays in football are executed in a very defined process.  If anything goes wrong, play execution fails most of the time.  It typically results in zero movement forward or sometimes a loss of yards.  On the other hand, Rugby is more about continuous sustained play with real time adjustments.  The team is not told what play to execute or has the benefit of a stoppage in play to make a static decision.  The rules of the game create a style of play that can appear very chaotic from the outside. (remind you of your startup business environment?)  However, team members practice around a basic framework or set of patterns, and when on the field – the team self organizes, and adjusts real time as the environment changes. 

The Speed of Play: Think about American football.  4 quarter hour segments of play time.   Then think about actual game duration in terms of actual time from start to finish.  There is a lot of time where there is no play.  Now think about Ruby.  The style of play is much faster – there is a lot more opportunity for real time ‘practice’ – fail, retry fail retry.  It happens so fast in the game play that you hardly have time to consider or even think about it as a failed play.  Its just a natural part of the game progression.  This coupled with real time learning on the field creates a very well practiced, fail fast and adapt, agile team operating under minimal constraints.     

One of the article above talks about dinking the ball down the field with small short plays.  Yes – good analogy and a potential strategy to get the ball across the line – as long as the team you are playing against is using the same rules.   Now think about about business.  To me, it is much more like rugby with very few rules about how the different teams move the ball.  If your team plays well under the rules of American football what happens when you are put in an environment with the same objective (moving the ball down the field to the end zone) but remove the constraints on how movement takes place and play doesn’t stop?  Think like a rugby team!

Tags:  marketing software tools, marketing planning systems, agile software development

Note:  This post origninally appeared on the old Balihoo blog on 11/10/09 by Sam Martin

More often than not when I am briefing a client for a media plan, I am asked a question surrounding the idea of local advertising on satellite television. This is obviously an important and key element of any integrated marketing plan.  My only response to this is that currently it is not possible to advertise locally on Direct or Dish TV. To be honest, I just wasn’t personally satisfied with this answer so I decided to do a little digging and what I unearthed was quite interesting.

There is an obvious demand out there from advertisers to get on satellite television. Satellite TV penetration seems to be growing, I see plenty of advertisements for it but to get actual penetration numbers has proven to be quite difficult. I spoke with a representative that buys satellite TV nationally and he alluded to the fact that Dish and Direct are neither required nor apt to give out their penetration numbers in fear that their competitors (standard cable) will use those numbers against them. This makes sense, as he continued to say that it is safe to assume that 20% of a market subscribe to one form of satellite TV. If this was not just an assumption, standard cable companies would love to use this to their benefit to form an argument on why not to go with satellite TV.

Enough of that, why can I still not execute local advertising on Dish or Direct TV? An article published in June of 2009 states that “DirecTV has banded together with Invidi Technologies to begin offering advertisers the ability to serve geo-targeted ads across its satellite network.” (http://tiny.cc/h2OJ5) That’s good news! Well sort of. If you are one of the fortunate ones that live on either the East or West coast you can take advantage of this service but for us, who are (in this case) “unfortunately” more centrally located, you will have to wait until 2011. A mere year, which I can use to my advantage perhaps to hone my TV buying skills and follow the triumphs and pitfalls of the beta group. A new, pretty cool twist on things, “beginning in 2011, advertisers will be able to target ads based on zip code, political district and at the household level, by picking up info from set-top boxes.” (http://tiny.cc/h2OJ5)

So now I have a more concrete answer to provide when clients ask me about local advertising on Direct or Dish TV, which makes me feel better. Just over a year we must wait my fellow non-East/West coast media buyers until we can get our eager clients on satellite television. I am actually looking forward to it though; the article mentions the juggernaut that is Google getting its fingers in the game, so who knows what that will bring…