This is the final installment of my three part series on developing a 90-day marketing plan. In case you missed it here is Part One and Part Two.

In the final 90 days, with the brand in focus and the marketing machine built, it’s time to drive demand.

Day 60 – 90: Drive Demand

Objective:

Raise awareness for the brand and drive a TBD number of qualified sales leads.

Goal:

A number of sales and marketing funnel metrics will be agreed upon to measure success.

Strategy:

Start an aggressive outreach campaign.

Tactics:

3.1 Build Organic Traffic with SEO

The payoff for the time and money spent on updating the site is the ability to start building a Search Engine Optimization program. I have had a tremendous amount of success with using a tool called moz.com. It helps you fast track your SEO efforts by giving short cycles of feedback in the form of letter grades on your site’s ranking for search terms. In the past I have been able to get listed on the front page for 15 of 18 terms I was working on. In a couple of cases the small company I worked for ranked in the number one spot while a 3.6 billion dollar company was in second.

Resources: $99 a month for a moz.com subscription

 

3.2 Test a SEM Campaign

The company will start a small AdWords campaign (About 2k a month) to test the viability of the leads SEM can generate for this type of business. To optimize the campaign, the ads themselves will lead to targeted landing pages with a clear “Call-To-Action”. These will be used as a direct response tactic. In addition to simply tracking click through rates on the ads or conversion rates on the landing page the key metric here will be how many paying customers come from the effort and measuring the cost of customer acquisition versus other marketing efforts.

Resources: $2,000 a month, $4,000 in total for a two-month trial.

 

3.3 LinkedIn Outreach

If ever there was a social network designed around the company’s core audience, LinkedIn is it. The strategy here would be to start engaging the community in Groups and also test an advertising campaign. Much of the work done here can also be leveraged on Quora. The Human Resources section on Quora has over 4,700 members.

 

3.4 Content Syndication Across Social Channels

All of the new content that will be created will need to be syndicated through existing social channels including LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook. New content should also be developed and pushed to currently under utilized channels like YouTube and Slideshare.

 

3.5 Email Marketing

The use of dedicated landing pages will provide the company with one of its most valuable assets: a marketing database. To leverage this database, regular email communications will be created starting with a Monthly Newsletter. This will be a digest of some of the best content generating during the month with links leading back to the blog. A more long-term email campaign will later include email nurturing to keep prospects engaged that are not ready to buy now.

Resources: Email software costs vary by the size of the list. Estimated at $100 – $500 a month.

 

3.6 Online Advertising and Retargeting

Online display advertising can be an expensive way to market with notoriously low click through rates. However, if you can target your niche with relevant offers you can get better than average results. At PubNub I ran a campaign on Stack Overflow, a niche site for developers to get technical help with coding. The design of the ads was aimed squarely at this technical audience and featured actual code snippets. Our click though rate was 3x the site’s average. If we can find niche sites that our audience visits, a test campaign would be valuable.

Resources: $2,000 a month for a period of two months to test.

Site retargeting is another option once our site traffic reaches 10,000 unique visits a month. This will help bring visitors back to our site by retargeting them with ads as they visit other sites across the web.

Resources: Ad retargeting for 10,000 unique visitors is as low as $500 a month.