Now that the initial editorial content has been designed for the promotional campaign, then the task of writing the editorial content for the campaign moves to the follow up information that will be sent contacts as engagement opportunities develop. We think it makes sense for follow up information to be designed to move the interest level of the prospect further along a progressive path towards a purchase inquiry.

Let’s use our example to illustrate how this progress can work. Once again, our hypothetical product is a method of successfully collecting a very high percentage of email messages by employee, regardless of whether the email message is sent by on premise servers, private cloud servers, or public cloud servers like GMail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, etc. The prospect market for this product are businesses in heavily regulated industries, for example, oil and gas exploration, banking, etc.

The message communicated by the initial component of our promotional campaign is that the risk represented by employees sending out emails in any manner that they choose, to whomever they wish, and whenever they wish, is too great for business management to ignore. The intended audience of this first promotional piece are managers who will “feel the pain” of regulatory action. The urgency of stopping the pain represented by this risk is the likelihood that the fines that result from regulatory action may go beyond anticipated amounts, with unpredictable consequences on the overall business.

The prospect profile should dictate the topic of the next piece of information in the promotional sequence. For example, if our email management solution has been on the market for a while, then we can look at past purchase history to determine the type of prospect most likely to purchase the solution. If our research shows that most of the current customer base for our product amounts to businesses that are either too big to risk an unpredictable exposure like the fine that we have presented, or businesses that have actually had to pay a fine of this type, then it will make sense to offer prospects a case study, or white paper on the specific topic of recent past history of fines levied by relevant regulatory agencies on corporate offenders.

The likely readers of this tier II collateral should be individuals with a specific interest in learning more about the frequency of these fines, as well as about the actual magnitude of the cost of the fines. Obviously, other parties may request this information who have little or no purchase interest, but we should be on comfortable ground that most of our interest will come from the right market segment.

In the next post to this blog we will look at 5 pieces of information that should be collected from anyone interested in receiving this tier II collateral.

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