5 "pitfalls" to avoid in marketing activities

As the old saying goes, "Failure is the mother of success." In today's rapidly iterating Internet era, quickly trial and error, correcting and learning from experience to improve the next attempt is often considered a very effective, low-cost trial and error solution. For companies and individuals, precisely because it is impossible to succeed forever, the project experience accumulated from failure often plays a role in the creation of corporate products and the improvement of individual and even team capabilities that cannot be underestimated.

To this end, this article is also based on the process restoration of a not-so-successful B2B website customer promotion activity case. It sorts out and analyzes the "five pitfalls" encountered in B2B customer promotion and expansion, the reasons behind them, and the author's summary of what effective B2B customer promotion and expansion should be. It is hoped that through the summary and analysis of representative cases, it will have a certain reference role in B2B customer promotion and expansion activities in related industries.

Process: The whole process of a B2B website customer promotion and development activity

1. Activity Overview

From January to February 2015, in order to increase the number of customer registrations on its B2B website, a company conducted a 21-day offline "caravan" customer development activity for offline channel customers, and carried out ground promotion through roadshows and mobile activities in core business districts in 11 cities in Guangdong Province, including Guangzhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhaoqing, etc.

2. Activity process

The entire ground promotion and expansion activity has been fully prepared in the early stage with clear division of labor and action node deployment, and is carried out around the B-end customer website registration. The specific activity process and registration process are shown in the following table:

Table 1: The general process of ground promotion activities

Figure 1: Customer registration process

Taking into account the progress of ground promotion and the effect of roadshow, while the business manager is conducting ground promotion to expand customers, the caravan roadshow activities will be carried out on-site, and the entire ground promotion activity will be carried out in the form of "position + guerrilla". The contents of the “Caravan” roadshow are shown in the following table:

Table 2: “Caravan” roadshow process and content

3. Activity effect

The event covered 32 business districts in 11 cities, attracted more than 47,676 people, developed 102 potential customers, and successfully expanded 33 customers (i.e. the number of customers converted to complete B2B website registration).

During the period, the B2B platform visits (UV) were 8,108, down 9.9% from the previous month. Among them, the number of visitors from within the province was 7,540, and the average daily number of visitors was 243, down 19 from the previous month, a decrease of 7.3%; the number of page views (PV) in the month was 204,000, and the average daily number of views was 6,578, down 20.1% from the previous month.

For those who are not engaged in B-side marketing activities, they may not have much concept about customer development and B2B website visits and browsing. Therefore, the author attempts to further sort out the points that should be paid attention to in B-side customer marketing activities through the following simple activity effect analysis and reflection on this activity.

Result: Customer outreach activities were unsuccessful

If I tell you a few other analytical figures about this event: the preset minimum target of the event is 58 successfully registered customers (the expansion cost is 3,793 yuan/customer), but the actual customer expansion cost is 6,667 yuan/customer (excluding labor and support costs of company participants), the year-on-year growth rate of customers is -59.29%, the month-on-month growth rate of customers is -76.37%, the forward growth rate compared with the average monthly number of registered customers in the previous period is -45.74%, and the backward growth rate compared with the average monthly number of registered customers in the second half of the year is -16.13%. Perhaps we will have a more three-dimensional perception of the effect of this event operation .

As you can imagine, although the activity was affected by the off-season, it was indeed not a successful ground promotion activity in terms of effect, mainly manifested in the following aspects:

• First, in terms of results orientation, the set goals were not achieved . This activity was fully planned and prepared, but why did it not achieve good results? Even the minimum preset goals were not achieved.
• Second, in terms of activity input and output, this is high cost and low efficiency ; through the analysis of input and results, the cost of expanding a single customer is too high;
• Third, in terms of the change in the effect of the event, there is almost no impact ; through the changes in the number of relevant customers before and after the event and the analysis of the website UV and PV, there is no growth effect. Although it cannot be ruled out that the decline was caused by the influence of previous online promotional activities, if the time is extended and compared with the average situation of the previous year and the average situation of the second half of the year, the effect of the event is still not optimistic.

For this reason, while we are giving a final assessment of this event, the author is also thinking about what explicit or implicit pitfalls this event encountered from planning to execution?

Reflection: 5 pitfalls in this failure

Therefore, judging from the results of this ground promotion and expansion activity, it is indeed difficult to consider it a success. It is not an exaggeration to say that we can learn a lot of lessons from it. For this reason, when the author tried to review the entire stage of the ground promotion activity again, he found that in fact, many pitfalls were inadvertently encountered during the entire operation of the activity, and these pitfalls could actually be avoided.

Pitfall 1: Activity model does not match audience characteristics

For offline promotion of Internet products or website fans, we used to be more exposed to ground promotion for C-end consumers. Roadshows, stalls, street sweeping, community gatherings and other ground promotion modes are common. However, the "caravan" activity mode, which is more inclined to roadshows, is naturally suitable for promoting or attracting fans to C-end individual customers.

Because there are relatively more individual customers on the C-end, they usually appear in certain consumer hotspots in a concentrated manner, and there is a regular flow of people to follow. For the C-end ground promotion, as long as the flow is intercepted, passive traffic can be obtained;

As for the B-end (the target customers are enterprises) ground promotion, whether it is to attract fans or develop business cooperation through this method, its audience is much smaller than that of the C-end, and it requires a larger base of potential customers. However, the distribution of B2B customers, especially 2B customers in specific industries, is difficult to achieve a high degree of concentration. Even if the degree of concentration is high and the possibility of potential concentrated expansion exists, the decision-making chain is long or the time and whereabouts of key expansion target personnel cannot be controlled, resulting in the inability to conduct efficient contact and docking as expected. B2B customer ground promotion and expansion is naturally suitable for indoor invitations such as promotion meetings, ordering meetings and seminars, or similar to the "door-to-door" sales promotion method often used by insurance practitioners in the early stage (but this is already a very excluded method and needs to be carefully considered).

In fact, the biggest problem this time is that there was no good research on the characteristics of B2B customers and the C-end operation model was actually adopted for B-end ground expansion. This can be said to be a huge pit. Although the purpose of the activity is clear, the characteristics of the audience have been intentionally or unintentionally ignored.

To distinguish the differences between the B-end and C-end customer marketing models, the following briefly summarizes the two different customer characteristics and marketing strategies:

Table 3: Different customer characteristics and corresponding marketing strategies

Through the above comparison, we can find that for B-end ground promotion, if we want to achieve the desired effect, both more formal conference marketing such as exhibitions and promotion meetings and individual "sweeping the building" forms such as door-to-door recommendations are feasible. Both forms can contact B-end customers; but the "caravan" form is extremely unsuitable for B-end customers because it adopts a non-indoor "positional warfare" method. Therefore, in order to ensure the value of the event, more emphasis is placed on supporting existing customers or potential development customers as a promotional activity. The execution of the event has deviated from the original purpose of customer expansion and directly turned into promotional activities support for C-end customers.

Pitfall 2: Not identifying potential customers

Through the above distinction between the characteristics of B-end and C-end customers and the forms of ground promotion, it is not difficult to see that for the ground promotion activities on the C-end, as long as you choose a business district with a large flow of people and block the location according to the flow of people, and cooperate with roadshow promotion activities to attract or intercept the flow of people, the effect of the activity is relatively easy to control;

However, field promotion to B-end customers is not that simple, because the flow of B-end customers is relatively small and their mobility is poor, which is very different from the characteristics of C-end customers. Compared with C-end customers, even if there is not sufficient preparation in the early stage and it is launched hastily, adjustments can be made more flexibly during the activity. To this end, in order to ensure the effectiveness of ground promotion for B-end customers, accurate information and even appointment work for potential customers in the early stages is particularly important. Often, whether these preparations before the event are in place basically determines the effectiveness of the event.

This also requires that the field promotion for B-end customers needs to circle potential customers in advance and make appointments, form an expansion directory (this directory is required to be accurate to specific companies, personnel, positions and even contact numbers), and have a relatively accurate grasp of the specific circumstances of these directory customers before the field promotion begins. At this time, the field promotion activity only provides a venue to gather these B-end customers together. In other words, the superficial things we often say have already been done in advance, and the field promotion is just a "formality."

If the activity model is chosen incorrectly at the beginning, it may not have a fundamental impact on the effectiveness of the activity. However, if potential ground promotion customers are not listed and accurately positioned, then the activity is basically out of control at the tactical level.

Pitfall 3: Insufficient pre-event warm-up and invitations

If there is a clear catalog of customers, precise preheating is a natural thing. In fact, the action of cataloging customers was also a more difficult point in the event planning process at that time, because there was indeed no information on customers to be expanded, and no customer census activities were conducted in the early stage. The only thought was that these customers could be gathered together through an event and registered as customers.

Facts have proved that ignoring the common sense of "sharpening the knife does not delay the chopping of wood" often leads to "going astray", especially when there is no preheating for the event (during the event planning stage, there was discussion about preheating publicity and coverage of the event through group text messages, but due to considerations of legal issues, the inability to accurately cover and the limited event budget, all possible preheating methods were abandoned), and there is no sufficient advance material coverage and publicity and sufficient invitations for the event city, which often directly leads to the low awareness of the event and the deserted event site, which is a pitfall that may be more obvious and felt more strongly than the event model; it may also directly cause the ground promotion event to become a "cook without rice".

Pitfall 4: Choosing a partner based on budget

The entire ground promotion activity adopted the form of ground development by business managers and stationed or mobile promotion by caravans. Although both parties cooperated effectively, the professionalism of the event partner, the roadshow company, had an unignorable impact on the ground promotion activity.

Because this event was an experimental exploration, the budget was forcibly reduced, so there was a compromise mentality in the selection of partners for this event. The partners were obviously good at pure roadshows, that is, judging from their previous cases, they were only good at C-end promotional roadshows, did not understand the needs of B-end ground-based activities, and had no ground-based experience (although there are relatively few advertising companies or consulting companies in the industry that have both roadshow and ground-based capabilities). Facts have also proved that in the entire early stage of event planning and docking communication process, the grasp and understanding of the purpose of the event requires frequent communication, and even the event plan and execution have deviated to varying degrees, which are difficult to correct. But because of this kind of compromise, the ground promotion activities have gone further and further astray.

Therefore, the author suggests that for any ground-based activities, no matter what the circumstances, it is not recommended to choose an activity partner company that has no corresponding activity experience and lacks business capabilities; if you compromise because of budget issues, this compromise will inevitably affect the quality of the entire activity.

Pitfall 5: Activity execution is forced to adjust

After the caravan went on the road and the ground promotion began, the business manager and the entire event encountered tremendous pressure. Customers were not in the company or store, customers were unwilling to come to the roadshow area, and there were very few customers...

In view of this situation, a temporary strategic adjustment had to be made. "Caravan" carried out joint promotions with B2B customers who were already registered on the website, directly turning the "Caravan" ground promotion activities into roadshow promotion activities, in order to give full play to the value of the "Caravan" roadshow activities, but still retained the simultaneous ground promotion by business personnel.

At this point, some of the "Caravan" ground-based promotion functions have completely failed. The forced adjustments to the execution of ground-based marketing activities now seem to be inevitable and irreversible. As the saying goes, the tone of a successful ground-based marketing campaign has actually been set before the campaign begins.

The reasons for these problems are mainly due to unclear positioning in the planning stage of the ground promotion activities, mismatched budgets, inconsistent understanding of the activities by the organizing and coordinating departments, and insufficient caution in selecting partners. I believe that the above five pitfalls may be encountered by B-end field sales workers to a greater or lesser extent. After all, compared with C-end field sales, the difficulty coefficient of field sales for B-end customers is relatively high, and the effect is not easy to see immediately. An effective B-end marketing campaign should accurately understand the activity goals and characteristics of target customers in terms of activity positioning, design marketing activities specifically based on the characteristics of target customers, lock in potential target customers in advance, and conduct effective activity notifications and reservations. Before the activity starts, it is necessary to ensure that at least contact has been made with the customer. After that, certain activity forms suitable for B-end customers should be used to effectively achieve the activity goals.

Summarize

Internet marketing activities can be divided into online activities, offline activities or online and offline linkage according to the form of activities; and activity operations can be divided according to the purpose, generally focusing on brand promotion-oriented, sales-oriented and comprehensive achievement of key operational indicators (such as improving activity, retention rate , customer registration rate , etc.); according to whether the target customer attributes of the promotion activities are individuals or enterprises, it can be divided into marketing expansion for C-end and promotion for B-end customers... Different purposes, target customers and activity forms require us to design and carry out marketing activities in a targeted manner.

The ground promotion activities involved in this article are completely different from the C-end ground promotion activities in the Internet ground promotion activities. It is an offline promotion aimed at expanding B-end customer registration and generating cooperation. In order to achieve the purpose of "attracting fans", we need to do more preparation work: through the analysis of the characteristics of potential activity objects, catalog customer warm-up and effective invitation, and the use of appropriate activity forms (such as industry forums, product ordering meetings, promotion meetings or email push through online registration channels, advertising, etc.) and the selection of matching activity partners, etc., which are particularly important for achieving the overall effect of the activity.

In short, whether it is a ground promotion activity for expanding C-end individual users or the B-end customer expansion involved in this article, the primary goal that needs to be achieved in the operation of ground promotion activities is "attracting new customers" among the three goals (" attracting new customers ", " retention " and "activeness") that we often mention in daily operations; through the analysis of the above cases and combined with daily experience, the author believes that although each ground promotion activity may encounter more than the five "pitfalls" mentioned above, various "pitfalls" may be encountered, but every effective ground promotion activity, the author believes that the ATM-PDCA model can be applied for testing, that is, through the detailed matching of ATM (target to model), with the help of the practical action decomposition of the PDCA cycle, to ensure that the entire ground promotion activity is carried out step by step from the target to the model and then to the execution level, and finally achieve good ground promotion results:

• ATM (Aim To Model): From goal to model , that is, a feasible and good ground-pushing activity operation must first have accurate, specific, and quantifiable activity goals, and in order to achieve this goal, a supporting activity model (form) is required; because only a high degree of match between the goal and the model can produce a good ground-pushing activity operation.
• PDCA: Also known as the Deming cycle, Plan, Do, Check, Action. If these four steps can be strictly followed in the field promotion activities, the process management of the field promotion activities can be well controlled in terms of quality, thus ensuring the standardization of ATM.