One of the beautiful things about having a strong digital agency within our amazing Chicago PR firm is that we’ve got a wide array of tools to throw at any business challenge our clients are facing.
At Walker Sands, and at Walker Sands Digital, we take the integration of PR and digital marketing very seriously, and we are constantly challenging ourselves to think of new ways to meld PR with Digital to get great results for our clients.
Want to test how good you are at coming up with a marketing strategy that blends PR tactics and digital marketing tactics? Here’s a hypothetical scenario we used in a recent Walker Sands internal training session for our Account Directors.
By the way, if you run an integrated marketing agency or teach a university class on integrated marketing, feel free to use this integrated marketing case study example, but do give us a mention.
To get started, just read through the exercise and then answer the questions at the end.
We find it’s best to do this exercise with others in small teams. Then compare notes on what you’d recommend to your client. Believe me, you’ll learn a lot just by listening to how the other teams approach the challenge and what they recommend as a go-forward marketing program.
No answers are provided because there’s no one right answer. Enjoy!
A small, venture-funded software company based in Chicago, SuperQuotes, is interested in hiring your integrated marketing agency and comes to the office to discuss your services.
They have a SaaS solution called ExpertRFP that helps clients prepare RFPs for over 100 different outsourced service offerings. For example, to write an RFP for a PR agency, the end user is walked through a series of questions online. After answering the questions, the RFP is automatically generated and can be saved as a Word document.
The target market includes both SME (small and medium enterprises) and larger multinational companies. To date, however, with only one exception, they have only been able to get SME companies as customers: they have accumulated 300 small businesses as customers since their launch six months ago.
For the SME market, their SaaS RFP generation offering is sold on a per-template basis. A company can choose to simply buy and generate a single RFP, e.g. an RFP for IT support managed services. Doing so costs $250. If a company is willing to pre-pay for 5 RFP templates, the cost is $1,000. Other price points are $2,750 for 15 templates, and $10,000 for full access to all of the 100 RFP templates.
The enterprise market is a priority for the CEO and he’s frustrated that large corporations are not buying. They have even run some expensive print ads in a few procurement trades that cater to a Global 3000 corporate audience, but did not generate any leads from these ad buys. The only sale they have to date is to a large corporation in Schaumburg, based on a referral from one of the principals at the VC firm that invested $1,000,000 in SuperQuotes. That sale was $80,000, giving the customer full access to all of the ExpertRFP templates and a free upgrade to an Ariba integration module that is in the works.
Revenues to date, based on six months of operations, are a disappointing $160,000 in sales. The CEO/Founder had conservatively hoped to have done $750,000 in sales by now.
Of the 100 RFP templates they have, one template has driven 60 percent of their SME sales. It’s an RFP template for a VoiP phone system. ExpertRFP’s VoiP phone system template was mentioned in a Costco Connection article, which brought in over 2,000 visits to SuperQuotes home page. The CEO believes the other RFP template customers they have acquired resulted from either a modest PPC campaign they run ($2,000 a month) or from some ads they ran in a few small business and entrepreneur-centric print publications.
The CEO doesn’t know much about marketing or PR but he has heard good things about Walker Sands. He likes that we provide a wide variety of services and that we’ve worked with other tech startups and SaaS companies.
He’s recently hired a new COO, a former executive from BuyerZone who is an expert on all things procurement, a recognized thought leader; the CEO hopes to leverage the talents of his new COO to get the word out about SuperQuotes and the benefits of using ExpertRFP.
Come up with all the questions you would want to ask this prospective client that would help you to define a good program for them.
Based on what you know, develop a program that incorporates both Digital and PR for this client. Include rough budgets for each item in your program, as well as a rationale for including the item in the program and any assumptions you’ve made that led you to recommend the item.
Be prepared to discuss how you will manage the program and ensure that we do great work for the client.