IT’S LITTLE WONDER that our media-rich world drowns out the impact of a single ad or direct response piece. Integrated marketing, which uses a number of advertising vehicles to pitch a product or service to a specific audience, seeks to fight that infobabble. The multiple channels cut through the buzz of fact and factoid, truth and trivia.
But as the examples here illustrate, a marketer has to hit the target audience more than once with the same message, using as many different media as possible. And more and more-particularly when the product or service is targeted at a well-defined, niche audience-the marketing mix is traditional direct mail, space ads and Web sites.
Bizfon Inc., Salem, NH, is using those media to sell a business phone system to small businesses, including the potentially lucrative Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. The telephone system provides features and services, such as call routing, fax on demand and Internet access, usually available to large companies at high prices.
Bizfon (pronounced “biz phone”) began targeting its audience with surveys and focus groups, trying to find out what sort of phone system small businesses needed. The research also looked into price point and channels of distribution. The result was a turnkey system with unit prices starting at $995.
The company identified those markets it believes will be prime industries for the system, such as real estate and independent insurance agents, nonprofits and financial planners.
Michael George, Bizfon’s vice president of marketing and direct sales, says he expects Bizfon to be a multimillion-dollar company this year, its first. There are 40 million businesses being targeted. If Bizfon captures just 1%, that will be 40,000 units by the end of the year-though George describes his realistic expectation as “below that.”
To achieve that, George points out, “You have to surround people with information.” He plans to use space ads, direct mail pieces, Web links and banner ads, and booths in trade shows to attract customers.
Bizfon’s space ads will appear in Entrepreneur, Business Week and other general business and trade publications. A direct mail campaign of 50,000 pieces a month will supplement the space ads. Both the ads and the DR pieces are slated for the first week of April.
Bizfon also intends to build an online network of links and affiliates. The company hopes to link its Web site (www.bizfon.com) to others, offering the referring sites a commission on sales. Bizfon’s Web site will be set up for e-commerce by the end of May.
While Bizfon obviously can expand its campaign to other markets and industries, it’s doubtful that Medtronic Neurological Inc., Monticello, MN, will ever go beyond its target audiences of neurosurgeons and pain management specialists, the latter a relatively new practice within professional medical services.
The purpose of Medtronic’s integrated marketing campaign is to generate leads for its neurostimulation device to control chronic back pain. Despite its being on the market for over 15 years, many physicians do not believe the device works, according to Rik Meyers, executive vice president and creative director of Medtronic’s agency, Kerker Marketing Communications in Minneapolis. The campaign coordinated the creative in the space ads and mail pieces, matching art and copy exactly in each case. According to Meyers, repetition would help people remember.
The clever creative addressed head-on the perception that Medtronic’s neurostimulator was flawed, Meyers says. One ad likened the technology to a dimmer switch for pain, while another offered comic book-style characters and a joy buzzer with a line about “misconceptions of neurostimulation.”
The ads appeared in Spine, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Neurosurgery and The Journal of Neurosurgery. Even though it was a “real hit” with surgeons in focus groups, Meyers says, two publications refused to run the joy-buzzer ad because they found it “too controversial,” saying it made light of a serious issue.
The direct mail pieces were dropped in February/March, April/May and June/July of 1998. To build the 10,000-name mailing list, several files were merge/purged, explains Mike Gray, Kerker’s vice president of direct marketing. Besides the subscriber files from publications the space ads appear in, others used include Medtronic’s house file and the American Medical Association’s neurosurgeon and orthopedic surgeon lists.
The mail pieces included successful case studies and four “pain-free” ways to get more information: business reply card, e-mail, fax and toll-free number. Gray says the campaign’s overall response rate was 9.4%, or some 935 qualified sales leads.
Pain, more critical than chronic, is behind the Direct Marketing Association’s integrated campaign to promote its International Echo Awards. The idea is to turn the traditionally staid event into something more exciting, according to Echo Awards committee chairman Brian Anderson.
The solution Richard Eber, executive creative director at New York’s McCann Relationship Marketing, came up with is tomatoes-you know, the funny fruit you throw at something you don’t like.
The pro bono effort surrounds its target audience with images of thrown and splattered tomatoes. The image links four mailings of three postcards and an application kit, space ads in all the trades, and a Web site (www.dma-echo.org).
The first mailing went out Feb. 5 to a 20,000-name file made up of past entrants and inquirers as well as of lists the DMA got through barter. To help boost response, the mailings are going to both agencies and client companies.
A teaser postcard is being followed by the application kit, with two follow-up cards to remind people to enter. Eber and Anderson hope the reminder cards will do more than hike response; they want them to decrease the number of last-minute applications and make all entries easier to process. Last year the Echo Awards drew more than 1,000 campaigns.
The space ads refer readers to the Web site and a toll-free number. Entry forms can be downloaded from the site or obtained by fax-on-demand.
The direct mail pieces, space ads and Web site are illustrated with images of thrown and smashed tomatoes, a theme Eber and Anderson aim to continue at the Echo Awards ceremony itself at the DMA fall conference in Toronto.
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