Young Social Entrepreneur

Here is a break down of my take on how a Sales Campaign should look.

A couple of years ago the social enterprise Media company I manage had success in winning a contract with a major construction firm. Using the portfolio and contacts gained from this initial job has given us the opportunity to be a key provider of media services for the construction industry, and we now work with many of the largest construction firms in Europe.

I thought it might be useful to give insight into the way I have approached our latest construction industry sales campaign, to help others adapt it into the field they operate within.

Step One - Market Segmentation. Immerse yourself in the market, use past experience to understand who to target (both individuals and firms), gather targets contact details. Ask for support from current clients in gathering contacts for the campaign and feeding into what will make the offer most effective.

Step Two - The Offer. Make sure that what you are offering is hitting the sweet spots, see my post on ‘selling with pain’. I got in touch with some of my clients to feed into our approach to Stakeholder Engagement and Communication in the construction industry. The offer you create should be immediately attractive, so if it is complex, use a diagram to show how it works, as I have done:

Step Three - Use a Viral / Social Media element. Make it easy for your initial contacts to spread the word for you. We created a show reel that is posted around our blog and social media channels. This is easy for people to share around:

Step Four - Put all your information in one place. However you contact you targets -CRM system, 3rd party e-mail service (Mailchimp), meetings, phone calls or networking - always invest in a good landing page with a clear call to action, this is your shop front. The landing page for this campaign is personalised to let people know who they will be dealing with when they get in touch. It incorporates all of the elements needed to gain interest - the show reel, similar projects, testimonials, offer and a clear call to action. Click here to view the finished result.

Step Five - SELL!

Having attended a number of seminars, workshops, networking events and conferences we decided to put on our own workshop, titled as above. The aim of the workshop is to teach people how, with the right open source software, it can be pretty cheap to set your digital marketing strategy up. As the attendees were all social enterprises or charities this was important. Workshops are also a way of getting the company name out there and improving our rep, although obviously they do take some planning.

Today was the first session and the results were good. I wasn’t sure how much detail to go into and what to focus on as digital media is such a broad subject so was pleased that there were only 7 or so businesses present. The topics covered included an overview of digital media, developing your online presence (including Content Managed Websites and Social Media), client relationship management as a backbone of the company (we use Sugar CRM Community edition which is open source) and Promotional strategies. The power point is above, although if you really want to find out more you should attend our next session, click here for more details and some feedback from today’s session.