Compac's Matt Stillwell took out the 2017 PMA A-NZ Produce Plus Marketer of the Year Award for his work on the Spectrim launch campaign, a predominantly online campaign that successfully segmented Compac's target audiences for the cutting-edge defect sorting technology. He offers advice on how to structure your next promotional push.
1. Know your audience
A key part of the Spectrim campaign was understanding our target audience. At Compac we have developed six buyer personas and for this campaign we targeted four of them. The campaign targeted Packhouse Pete, Corporate Ken, Marketing Mary and Grower Gary. Having well-defined buyer personas allowed us to tailor our messaging for each relevant persona and maintain a customer-focused organisation. It also helps us understand our audiences’ goals and pain points and position our product accordingly.
2. Content
Creating engaging content is vital for any campaign and each piece of content should have a purpose. The Spectrim campaign consisted of content to create awareness at the top of the funnel, and content to help move prospects through the buyer’s journey. We produced blogs that were targeted towards our personas with call-to-actions to watch the behind-the-scenes video of Spectrim. The video told the story of what went into developing the platform from the engineers’ point of view. For the content to be effective it had to be useful, timely and relevant to our specific audience.
3. Ditribution
We spent a lot of time creating content, but all that effort would have been wasted if it didn’t reach our target audience. The campaign had a predominately digital focus with a multi-channel approach. Social media and trade media were very important channels for attracting our personas to the campaign and once we had them interacting with our content we used marketing automation to deliver relevant content and nurture the prospects for our sales team.
4. Measure and adjust
Throughout the campaign we were continually measuring the performance and adjusting along the way. We were constantly measuring the performance of each piece of content and whether it was achieving its goal. Because the campaign was delivered online we were able to access a lot of metrics and insights. We could see which content and messaging was most effective and continue to create similar content. The campaign was also targeted towards different produce types so small adjustments were made to keep it relevant to different audiences.
5. Storytelling
Storytelling is an effective way to engage your audience and get your message across. We used this approach in the behind-the-scenes video, where we had the people (engineers are great storytellers) who worked on developing Spectrim talk about what went into making it the world leading inspection system. The behind-the-scenes video was broken into three parts, the problem, the journey and the solution. Spectrim is a technical product, but by telling its story we were able to educate our audience in an engaging way.
