To execute a marketing campaign, you have to juggle many moving parts: lists, creative, media buys, proofs, fulfillment and tracking. 

It’s time consuming to organize multiple vendors and resources, and one missed deadline can throw your whole campaign off schedule. Software can help automate certain campaigns, but most web-applications for small-to-midsize companies don’t handle end-to-end campaign planning, fulfillment and execution (except for email marketing platforms).

Currently available marketing apps are typically extensions of CRM platforms and/or cover a specific niche like 

• Lead management
• Campaign analytics
• Email marketing
• Web marketing and SEO 

What I’ve been wondering is “why isn’t there a website for a marketer, or better yet, a non-marketer, to create and launch any number of different types of campaigns ‘soup-to-nuts,’ without leaving the browser?” 

In preparation for our upcoming Consulting M.O. v3.0 launch, I’ve been reviewing web-based marketing execution applications. Why? While our tools help consultants plan marketing execution, we haven’t taken the extra step to deliver the actual tools to execute their plans.  It makes sense to add them to complement the robust planning functionality in our new version.  

There are some great apps out there, and I was fortunate enough to find one that’s different from the others. The folks at Ad Giants are creating it. Though their new app is still under wraps, our excitement isn’t:  

We’re excited to announce our partnership to bring together our detailed marketing planning tools with their powerful marketing execution apps.

What we can discuss

The partnership lays the foundation to bring together our Consulting M.O. platform of web-based marketing planning tools with Ad Giants’ marketing execution tools including The ONE System^TM for marketing brand management and PitchRocket^TM, a web-based lead generation and sales-messaging engine.

Dynamic messaging, personalization and direct results

While The ONE System is geared for bigger corporate clients and franchises, some of our consultants work with these types of clients and can earn commissions for referrals. And better yet, our licensees can gain special preview access to their new app, and discount pricing to their current PitchRocket application.

From PitchRocket, users can design custom, personalized direct mail and email campaigns, using variable printing and personalized website pages to deliver custom, sticky messages that are easy to track. Since PitchRocket provides list management, creative templates, web-sitelets and fulfillment services, users can design and launch a complete campaign from their browser, eliminating the need to hire and manage subcontractors. 

Think of it as 

• Using one-to-one printing in your direct mail piece;
• Integrating website pages with personalized URLs to extend your message;
• Adding email to the campaign; and
• Tracking the direct mail with almost the same precision as email tracking. 

Naturally, this combination delivers much higher response rates than an old school direct mail campaign. How much greater? It depends, but what Donovan Dillon, Ad Giants’ President, told me was impressive: “Jim, we don’t approve a template until we’ve tested it enough to achieve an 18% response rate.” 

Of course, actual results will also be impacted by list quality and offer relevance, but nevertheless, I was sold. 

What’s coming? 

As we both put the finishing touches on our new applications, we’ll share more information.  Our goal? Combine forces to deliver a one stop shop for marketing planning and marketing execution tools delivered via the web.

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Today we finally launched our revamped marketing [m.o.] content website. It’s called Process, Tips and Strategy for Business Marketers. 

The new website contains all of the previous marketing how-to articles from our former Marketing Tips from the Trenches blog, and detail about the marketing process. We’ll post new how-to articles weekly, and the site is free. Grab the feed here if you’re interested. 

We also added our first group of founding distributors’ profiles under the Consultants section. This advertising is one component of our Certified Distributor program. Since we no longer offer marketing services and focus solely on our products, we want to direct inbound leads to our partners, who have access to our tools (as well as their own expertise). 

Our Website Revamp 

Speaking of partners, thanks to Identity Studios for the new marketing [m.o.] site design.  They also did this site. They’re a young creative agency that’s growing rapidly and performing great work!

Since we’re finishing up a new article about the steps of a website content revamp, I thought I’d share more information about the marketing [m.o.] update. 

Our old site had a custom content-manager built in. It seemed like a good idea in 2006, but we wanted a more widely-accepted platform with easy customization and support, that’s very SEO friendly. We decided on WordPress, and chose to modify the Thesis theme. 

We encountered numerous challenges with Google while importing our existing blog and moving our content into WordPress, without losing links or PageRank. It turns out Google indexed well over 1,000 pages from our old site, because of the different subdomains we had created for the back-end of our application. Then, we had some problems with a plug-in scrambling our sitemap with each update, so Google Webmaster would show a growing list of 404 errors with each new crawl. After this experience, I think we’ll stay away from subdomains and sitemap plug-ins in the future. Not fun. Lesson learned. 

The good part is that updating content in WordPress is a breeze (once it’s setup properly). Login, cut & paste and viola–new pages! In fact, we’re using WordPress for this blog. Once we fix our image loader, we’ll add some photos to spice up our posts.

Upcoming Consulting M.O. v3.0 

Now that this project is complete, we can shift our focus to our upcoming new application. We started coding right before Thanksgiving, after spending three months working through specifications and requirements. The new version will shift from a static web app to a content platform, making it easier for our users and partners to modify our content, access the new content we’re producing, and create and store their own.

More to come …