Executive Summary

Our team had the privilege of working with the marketing manager at Church & State Wines, who turned out to be an ideal client for the internet marketing project. Church & State Wines is a growing winery eager to take its marketing initiatives to the next level. They were more than happy to take a chance on a team of Sauder MBAs and allow us to build out an internet marketing strategy over the course of 5 weeks. Inspired by content learned and practiced in the classroom, my team was prepared to tackle a real world challenge. We worked on a tangible project using valuable tools and frameworks learned in the classroom. At the end of the project, we not only provided refreshing insights and noteworthy recommendations to our client that can dramatically impact the company’s business objectives, we also generated more profits for our client as a direct result of our campaign efforts. Overall, this project was a fantastic way to practice how to build an effective internet marketing campaign to complement other business efforts with an end goal of driving sales.

Highlights

Our client was extremely easy to work with and provided our team with everything that we needed to conduct a successful campaign. At our kickoff meeting with our client, we were able to ask questions about the company’s strategic direction as well as their target audiences. We understood that internet marketing cannot occur without first understanding the business, business objectives, and related performance metrics. We proposed our ideas for the internet marketing campaign and agreed upon the final deliverables to level set expectations. Throughout the entire 5 weeks, we kept in contact with our client with regular updates and clarification questions. There were no surprised at the end of the project because our client had been informed of all our initiatives due to our open communication.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was working separately on individual pieces of the campaign when in fact all the tactics work together to complement each other. It’s difficult to isolate individual tactics because its effectiveness and impact often are dependent on other campaign components. Although I worked on the email marketing campaign which drove traffic to the online store, I wasn’t able to see results of my campaign in real time to measure its impact. This is because someone else on the team was working on Google Analytics and we didn’t spend much time working together. We learned through this project that different internet marketing tools have different purposes and usages. For example, Google AdWords is best utilized to capture new customers and drive traffic to the company’s website. Whereas email marketing campaigns are more effective for communicating with existing customers. Because we worked in silos on our individual pieces of the campaign, we didn’t piece together all of our learnings until the very end, after everyone came back with their own discoveries and results.

Client Presentation

Our client presentation went smoothly because we were diligent about the aesthetics of our content and the story we wanted to tell. We decided to start with the big picture strategy and our intentions before going into details about our tactics and findings. It was difficult to know what the client already knew since we had already sent him our deck ahead of time, so we made sure he felt comfortable cutting in and asking questions whenever necessary. We covered a lot of content during our hour-long presentation because we had a lot of valuable results to share. Even though we didn’t have time to go over all the details, we provided our client with all the information that he would need to go over on his own time. The most difficult question he asked was how to prioritize different tactics. We found it difficult to make recommendations because we didn’t know enough about what the company has in mind for its strategic focus. If the company wanted to focus on new customer acquisition, Google AdWords and social media engagement should be of key focus. But if the company wanted to focus on customer retention, then email marketing would be a great tool to leverage. So our suggestion was to focus on understanding each tool and the best practices we laid out in the presentation. Based on discussions with the rest of the management team, the company should make a decision on where to go next with its internet marketing strategy.

Our client was most impressed by Google Analytics because he has never been exposed to it before. Because Google Analytics were reserved for last, our client didn’t really understand the impact of some of our other tactics until he saw the Google Analytics report. The email marketing campaign that I was in charge of was extremely successful in driving purchase. 50% of those who clicked through bought a wine club subscription. This means our efforts actually generated sales for our client, which he may not have expected. We feel that we delivered a lot of informative content that can be very valuable to our client. It just may take him some time to digest everything that we learned over the 5 weeks.

Key Takeaways

Understanding different tools and knowing when to use each tool is more important that using everything regardless of its relevance to the business objectives.

Test and test again to improve campaign effectiveness. The tools we used made it really easy and economical to test many options and make changes in real time. There is very low risk involved if the tests are carried out in a calculated manner. The reward is much greater than the time it takes to set up and carry out all the testing.

Internet marketing is extremely fast paced and fluid. It requires high adaptability which can be achieved by lean and agile companies.

Internet marketing doesn’t happen in a bubble. It happens alongside other strategic planning and initiatives as an integral component that has significant impact on business success.

A meatball sundae is made up of good old meatballs served with fancy sundae toppings. It doesn’t sound too appetizing and that is author Seth Godin’s point. Godin wants to steer marketers away from making a meatball sundae because meatballs and sundaes, two perfectly good things on their own, just don’t go well together. And if they are combined for some reason, the meatball sundae won’t taste very good.

Meatballs are the average stuff sold to average people in a traditional way using Old Marketing. Godin defines Old Marketing as “the act of interrupting masses of people with ads about average products”

The fancy toppings are the tools and tactics of New Marketing that make magic happen. New Marketing has the power to transform an entire organization into something it never used to, while creating a magical experience along the way for all those involved. New Marketing is about using “every interaction, product, service, and side effect as a form of media” to earn the attention of consumers.

The challenge is that marketers can’t just swap Old Marketing for New Marketing. You also can’t just mix tactics of Old Marketing with strategies of New Marketing to get the best of both world; it won’t work. Sadly, you can’t fight the new realities and try to hide under a rock. Godin advocates that marketers work with New Marketing and get in sync with it. It’s not about asking what New Marketing can do for you, but asking what you and your organization can do to thrive with New Marketing.

Godin points out that “specific marketing models require specific organizational models to back them up”. New Marketing doesn’t actually demand better marketing, it’s a much bigger issue that doesn’t just exist within the marketing department. You can’t just use New Marketing to sell the same old stuff. New Marketing demands better products, services, and organizations. That’s what makes it transformational and a magical experience.

The greatest successes with New Marketing have been among newer, younger, and smaller start-ups. Not because these organizations are new, young, or small, but because they are willing to change and adapt. Marketing has changed because the “landscape of tomorrow” has fundamentally changed. That’s why organizations need to realize that the future will not look like the present. And doing what you have always done will not get to where you want to be.

How organizations become or stay successful is through marketing. Marketing isn’t just a supporting arm of the organization. Marketing should have the throne while being supported by the entire organization. Marketing is KING because it has the power to transform what we make and how we make it.

Here is Godin’s tribute to Marketers:

–        We spread ideas

–        We tell stories people want to hear and believe

–        We translate emotion into action

–        We close the sale

–        We make things people want to buy

–        We run things

The best marketers understand this: all we as people and consumers ever want is to be treated with respect and be connected to others around us.

Godin outlines 14 New Marketing trends that leverage this insight to continuously create marketing magic. The trends are not NEW since the book was published a few years ago, but they remain RELEVANT. Note that organizations don’t need to adopt all 14 trends. In fact, choosing the select few and being great at them might be what it takes to create just enough magic.

Below are my top 5 takeaways:

1. Always create products for the consumers. It’s not about you, it’s about the consumer. And if you are interrupting the consumer in any anyway, then its spam.
2. We as people like hear our own voices, to be heard by others, and to hear what others think. We think we are so unique, but most of us just want to be like most people, most of the time.
3. People like to look for truth and authenticity from other people, not marketers. So what marketers can do is “create ideas worth spreading and make it easy for people to spread them”.
4. We have extremely short attention spans as a result of all the clutter. So for marketers, there are no second chances and no learning curve. Whatever you do, best to get it the right the first time.
5. Lastly, don’t be in the middle. People want ordinary things that are cheap or special things that are worth the premium price. “Anything in the middle is boring and not good enough”.

At the end of the day, whatever you do, you need to be committed and focused. You can’t have both the meatball and the sundae. You can focus on the meatball and continue to make improvements to your organization using new tools and technology that exist. Or you can try something new and shake things up around you and “start a movement”. Pick one, get everyone on board, and commit to it.