Julie Cunnyngham, product marketing director at Hallmark Business Expressions, explains how a campaign generated leads and translated into a new selling strategy for the marketer
Q: What is Hallmark Business Expressions’ lead-generation strategy?
A: We work directly with businesses to help them market in an impactful, meaningful way through the use of customized greeting cards. We create ways of generating leads for our business development team to help explain to prospective clients what we do.
Q: Taking that new approach into account, what did Hallmark hope to accomplish with this campaign?
A: The goal was to break down in a formulaic and engaging way what Hallmark Business Expressions does for marketers. It was also to break down the components of how a greeting card could be used, and to get prospects to come to the booth to learn in-person how we can work with them.
Q: How did you use your recent “Anatomy of a custom greeting card” campaign to convey that message?
A: We showed a mock front of a card. The inside is where the essence of the marketing message is — where there is an opportunity to infuse more emotion and impact. The two-sided, four-color insert gives our clients a bit more range of where and how to include their message and offer. Finally, the back of the card is opportune place to put both our logo and the client’s logo.
Q: How did the customized greeting card effort leading up to the DMA 09 show differ from past efforts?
A: We always do a pre-show mailing, but to articulate what we mean by ‘customized card for business’ the pieces fell short as far as the message [in the past]. What we’ve learned is we need to be more literal in saying what we do.
Q: What were the results?
A: We left the show with 20 to 25 active leads.
Q: What is the next step in the campaign?
A: We’ve translated the foundation of the campaign into a whole new selling strategy. We’ve drafted off this first execution. We’re distributing [the strategy] to a broader audience and incorporating it into the selling story we take to client meetings to better explain both what we do and how we leverage each piece of a greeting card to get the most impact.
