With a goal of reaching the right people with the right message at the right time, the Marketing Task Force met at the 49th Annual Convention in Montreal to review the state of the current campaign and discuss the future of the program.
Since the start of 2014, the task force has been working on a national marketing plan to position precast as a versatile, modern, high-tech material (because it is), and to make it “top of mind” in the specifying community.
The Internal Campaign
With the theme “Take a New Look at Precast” as the defining message, the campaign started with distribution of a free Marketing Toolkit to members. The Toolkit, which is still being distributed, includes resources that enable the precaster to create custom messages in a variety of different formats. That is the internal portion of the campaign. To start the external campaign, the task force winnowed a wide choice of options to a mix of new and traditional media that form the meat of the 2014-2015 campaign.
The External Campaign
Launched in May, the campaign includes a small print component and a heavy focus on electronic advertising. Pay-per-click advertising on Google AdWords enables NPCA and the Take a New Look message to show up in searches where the NPCA website does not traditionally rank on the first search page. We are placing banner ads, e-newsletter ads and articles with key professional groups. The task force also elected to increase the distribution of Precast Solutions, the marketing publication of NPCA, by adding 10,000 new specifiers to the distribution. The task force also selected other traditional outlets to effectively reach the individuals that are most likely to purchase precast products manufactured by NPCA members. Outlets selected include:
- Roads & Bridges
- Water & Wastes Digest
- Storm Water Solutions
- Architect
- Public Works
Ad placements on architectmagazine.com
In just seven months, the two-year campaign has already smashed its goal of making 200,000 impressions from the start of the program through 2015. At last count, we have topped 4.65 million. What’s an impression, you ask? It is simply the number of times that one of our ads or other messages has been displayed to an end user. So far that has resulted in 18,173 clicks back to the precast.org website. That’s a view-to-click ratio of about .04%, which sounds like small potatoes. But in a world where the typical consumer in the U.S. sees more than 3,000 advertising messages per day, it’s pretty respectable. And those are 18,173 interested consumers – consumers who are now thinking about precast.
AdWords and More
The current marketing initiative will continue through the end of 2015, with opportunities to fine-tune the advertising mix based on results so far. The task force is currently looking at shifting some of the budget to Google AdWords, for example, due to its effectiveness so far. The task force is also looking at investing in re-marketing, which targets those who have visited precast.org. The Take a New Look landing page on precast.org will also be updated. Onward and upward!
If you have questions, please contact task force chair Greg Stratis or NPCA staff liaison Kirk Stelsel.
Kirk Stelsel
Director of Communication & Marketing, NPCA
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