Winning Business

A colleague of mine and I were standing in the lobby of a clients office talking to each other after wrapping up a day long business development meeting.  On the way down the elevator our discussion turned to what creative assets we’ll need from the client to go to market?  Of course we listed all the digital assets including case studies and work examples and how each would be relevant to the target audience. 

Increasingly we’re finding that great creative and perfect targets are becoming the easier part of most business development campaigns.  Oft overlooked but critical to any campaign is the delivery method or how to get your message into the hands of the people it was created for? Digital is easy. Its quick, interactive, dynamic and trackable. But the problem with email is that everyone is using it for business development.  In fact, its not uncommon for some marketers to receive email 40-50 solicitations a day. Email messages, if read at, all must be impactful and relevant or they’re deleted with a keystroke.  All the thought, planning and expected results gone!

That’s when I started wondering if old fashioned snail mail, although more expensive and time consuming, could be making a resurgence?  I’ve executed effective targeted campaigns for 50+/- high priority prospects, but what about a larger audience?  All things being equal, would a printed piece of creative make a bigger impact and get us to our intended results quicker?  If you send a poster size printed piece from the excellent Canadian Club campaign (“Your Mom Wasn’t Your Dad’s First” or “Your Dad Had Groupies”) it will probably make a bigger impact than the last piece of creative you did for Ata-boy Bank and their customer acquisition campaign.

So think about what you have in your newly created digital assets library and ask yourself if there’s something in there that’s so bad-ass if it were printed and sent to a prospect they might think its a cool piece of wall-art. And if it’s wall-art, its making an impact on awareness.  And after all, awareness is part of any good integrated business development campaign.