A few other quick notes about in-app PAD efforts:
Make sharing easy. If your app allows users to create content—be it a picture or even just their high score in a game—provide social sharing links so your SUBSCRIBERS can easily become AMPLIFIERS.
Encourage other channel engagement. Promote the benefits of being your FAN or FOLLOWER across your active social networks.
Use push messaging to serve, not just sell. When storms approached Austin during SXSW 2013, conference organizers used push messaging to alert the thousands of SXSW app-carrying attendees. The Weather Channel (@WeatherChannel) similarly leverages GPS data (e.g., geofencing) to offer location-specific weather alerts to its app users wherever they may be.
Resource Recommendations:
Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype by Jay Baer (@JayBaer)
Urban Airship (@UrbanAirship)—http://urbanairship.com/blog
Tactic #21: Direct Mail, Print Advertising, & Circulars
Printed materials possess a unique ability to capture and direct our attention. They’re tactile, visual, and don’t require a plug, battery, or electricity of any kind. You may find any number of the following types of print materials useful in your own PAD efforts:
Business cards
Coupons
Direct mail
Flyers
Free-standing inserts
Magazines
Newspapers
Pamphlets
Postcards
Store circulars
Print’s issue is one of cost and distribution. If you have both, then you can use print materials to:
Gain SUBSCRIBERS. Much like a TV commercial, your direct mail and print ads should do more than just sell. Use personalized URLs and QR codes to direct READERS to social login pages to gain direct, lower-cost audiences for future marketing.
Stir AMPLIFIERS. Instead of asking DONORS to mail letters on your behalf, ask them to post, tweet, and share. Include an SMS call to action (like The Wounded Warriors Project did), and your print piece becomes an immediate DONOR acquisition tool.
Showcase FANS and FOLLOWERS. When print READERS see comments from real people like them, it increases affinity for your brand. So why not showcase real Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram pictures, and more? They only humanize your brand.
Direct mail and print stand out in our hyper-digital age. However, their production costs demand that you leverage them more like TV advertising—not only to sell but also to build your proprietary audiences.
To QR Code or Not QR Code? That Is the Question
QR codes and their ilk are quick ways to deliver mobile SEEKERS to a website, landing page, or mobile app. QRs should be deployed where they provide some convenience; however, they should rarely appear without a corresponding short URL that enables SEEKERS who don’t have a QR code reader to reach the same destination. Absent a URL option, you’re limiting your potential audience, since less than 40 percent of consumers aged 18–34 scan QR codes with any regularity.12
Tactic #22: Co-Marketing
With Co-marketing, two companies leverage their brands, products, or proprietary audiences for mutual benefit. Taco Bell (@TacoBell) and Doritos (@Doritos) did this when they partnered to develop the Doritos Locos Taco.13 After only 70 days on the market, Taco Bell had sold 100 million units—unprecedented success for a new product, let alone one launched without a written contract between the two companies.c
Co-marketing can be just as exciting for Proprietary Audience Development as it is for product development. The key is to look for a partner that:
Offers different but complementary products or services
Commands the attention of CUSTOMERS whom you’d like to attract
Has Owned Media assets that their CUSTOMERS utilize regularly
Generates Earned Media regularly through AMPLIFIERS
Once you’ve identified a partner, you need to map out how you can each leverage your Owned/Earned Media assets and your proprietary audiences to mutual benefit. For Minnesota’s Cub Foods (@CubFoods) and Holiday Stationstores, this means promoting food and gas discounts via website, email, and store signage.14 For your company, it could be as simple as an email, a blog post, a webinar, or a series of tweets. Whatever the case, the keys to making Co-marketing work are:
Clear communication between the partners
Mutually beneficial growth of proprietary audiences
Relevance of all promotions to your proprietary audiences
Fail at that last point—relevance—and you’ll lose, not gain, audience members. And neither you nor your partner wants that.
Resource Recommendations:
Entrepreneur Magazine (@EntMagazine)—www.entrepreneur.com
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury
Tactic #23: Contests & Giveaways
Contests and giveaways can be a great way to build a proprietary audience fast. In fact, recent research found that including a $500 giveaway incentive on email opt-in landing pages increased the volume of new SUBSCRIBERS by 700 percent.15 There’s no question; people like free stuff.