Do you know how your market has changed since the pandemic? Welcome to "3"ā€¦three insights in about three minutes. Marketers consistently tell me about the nuances of change that have occurred with their markets. To share some insight, I'm speaking with Pamela Girardin. She's the VP of Marketing at LeadingResponse, a performance marketing firm that utilizes multi-channel solutions for client acquisition. Pamela, what have you uncovered about your prospective market?
Pamela Girardin: As marketers, we all know that we have to deliver our message to the consumer in multiple ways, but what we have found after the pandemic is that we must be prepared to receive information from the consumer in multiple ways.
Drew: Can you give me a real-life example when you figured out this insight?
Pamela: Yeah, so it was really fascinating. So, we as marketers put so much thought into our CTAs. What's going to pull, how can we get them to convert, what color the button should be, which performs better...and what we found is that we did all that, did all the research, we would send out the emails, but consumers - instead of clicking the button - they would hit "Respond to the email" or "Reply to the email". So, we'd get email responses, they would call the main number. Some would call the number we had listed on the email, and others would go to the website to contact us and just fill out a form, and then a few would actually do the appropriate CTA that we wanted, which was click the button and go to the landing page.
Drew: The prospect is going to respond the way they want to. We just have to be ready for it. Now, QR codes have been around and kind of flopped. However, this year, one was featured in a Super Bowl commercial. Technology's changed. You've been experimenting with QR codes. What have you discovered?
Pamela: Yeah, QR codes have totally changed. I'm dating myself, but I don't know if you remember, but everybody was so into QR codes, but you had to have a special reader, you had to download something, so consumers and really anybody wasn't using them. They were a pain! But now, they just work with focusing your camera. So, we've been using QR codes on direct mail, and what's interesting with that is we're actually getting a better response to the QR code than to the phone number, which is a typical direct mail response. We're also trying to eliminate collateral at trade shows; we all know what a pain it is. You take all this collateral, you give it away, you know 95% of it is in the trash bin at the hotel in all those rooms. They're not packing it; they're not taking it home. So, what we've done is we've created postcards that our reps are taking to conferences that have QR codes that take prospects to landing pages where they can download all that collateral, so they can have it on their devices on a digital format, or they can choose to print the PDFs if they want that old school paper.
Drew: Who knows? Maybe the rise of the QR code is the next big thing. "3" is a featured presentation of the Marketing Accelerator Podcast, now available on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google podcast. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.