1. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning:
Maximize Your Marketing
Calendar by Making Every
Channel Count
By Ahmed Taleb, Senior Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions
www.bulldogsolutions.com
Promotion_Planning V1 (03/2009)
© 2009 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.

2. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
Executive Overview
Much of the conversation about the way BtoB marketers connect with prospects has been geared towards
strategies designed to capture attention. But what do you do with your prospects’ attention once you’ve caught it?
Our approach to building a program with strong return on investment is to leverage calls to action to help direct
your prospects’ activities in a conscious way across the various promotion vehicles and channels that comprise
your online brand.
The goal is to create a cohesive and deliberate series of interaction points that add value to your prospects’
experience and lead to ever-increasing levels of engagement. Think of it as the polar opposite of “one and done.”
An effective promotion engine is not a series of individual media buys driving to one specific call to action such as
Webinar registration. Rather, it is a comprehensive plan that incorporates all of your online marketing activities.
In this third of a four-part series on strategic planning, I will outline three exercises designed to help you create an
integrated promotion roadmap. These exercises build on the strategic planning exercises described in my
previous white papers in this strategic marketing series: “Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to
Creating Buyer Personas” and “Three Steps to Developing Effective Calls to Action.” Both are available at
www.bulldogsolutions.com/bulldogma.
Bulldog Solutions’ Strategic Planning Methodology
www.bulldogsolutions.com
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3. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
Table of Contents
Executive Overview ............................................................................................................................................................. 2
Three Steps to an Integrated Promotion Roadmap .......................................................................................................... 3
Step #1: Take Stock of Your Existing Program .................................................................................................................. 3
Connect the Dots ................................................................................................................................................................ 4
Step #2: Identify and Refine CTAs ...................................................................................................................................... 5
Step #3: Fill in the Holes with Incremental Media Opportunities .................................................................................... 7
Test. Then Test Some More ................................................................................................................................................ 7
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Three Steps to an Integrated Promotion Roadmap
As mentioned above, the key to an effective promotion engine is to create a comprehensive plan that incorporates
all of your online marketing activities. At Bulldog Solutions, we advocate a three-step, systematic approach, which I
will outline in this white paper:
1. Take stock of your existing program: Capture and scrutinize your existing marketing calendar
and channels to identify opportunities to stretch your brand conversation and identify specific
conversion points in your marketing program.
2. Identify and refine calls to action (CTAs): Drive your prospects to specific conversion points,
tailoring each call to action to the vehicle for maximum relevance and perception of value.
3. Fill in the holes with incremental media opportunities: Evaluate your media program on an
ongoing basis to identify and address areas of declining performance, and dedicate more
resources, if needed, to high-performing areas.
Step #1: Take Stock of Your Existing Program
If your organization is like most, you already have many ongoing initiatives in your marketing program. You’re using
a variety of vehicles to accomplish your goals: Webinars, e-mail campaigns, virtual (and in-person) trade shows
and the like. And you’re using a variety of channels to reach your intended audience: A house newsletter, your Web
site, your trade show booth, search engine marketing, channel partners, third-party list rentals and lead
guarantee programs. Before approaching the development or refining of specific calls to action deployed across
those programs to lead to increasing levels of engagement, you need to identify where opportunities exist in your
current programs to build integration and cross-promote prospect traffic.
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© 2009 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.

4. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
The logical place to start is with your marketing calendar. Within the typical BtoB marketing calendar, there
are often gaps between parallel programs that have no deliberate points of integration. These programs are
operating as disconnected entities. Regardless of whether these are the result of organizational structures or
intentional team alignment, they represent missed opportunities to cross-pollinate.
Begin by capturing your marketing
calendar in a dynamic visual
format and walking through each
component with your marketing team
to understand its overall value to your
program. What are the goals? What
are the metrics by which success
is measured? For each marketing
vehicle—Webinar, trade show, e-mail
campaign—clearly identify an owner
as well as any requirements specific
to its use. This will help you begin to
understand where cross-promotion
opportunities exist. Identify opportunities to cross-promote by putting your
marketing calendar in a visual format.
The objective is to leverage the
activities that are already under
way to build synergies across your program as a whole. Remember to be pragmatic. You’re trying to extend the
effectiveness of your current program rather than re-architect a new one.
Connect the Dots
Once you’ve mapped out your calendar in this visual format, you’ll likely begin to see items that emerge as the
cornerstone events of your marketing program. Often these events have dependencies which are outside your
marketing control, and for this reason, are less flexible.
In order to integrate with these events, you’re going to need to identify the right set of vehicles that can be used
to support cross-promotion across these initiatives and channels. Ultimately, this exercise is designed to help
build and grow an ongoing conversation with your prospects. For example, the follow-up e-mails after a
Webinar could contain a registration call to action to attend an upcoming trade show on the same topic. A
follow-up e-mail to qualified leads gleaned at a trade show could drive to an exclusive briefing on a piece of
relevant research, or another, similar high-value offering.
The best place to start is by identifying and highlighting the core components. For example, if your organization
maintains a strong physical event practice, there are probably several key events such as trade shows that you
are committed to attending on an annual basis. Typically, these events are locked on your calendar months in
advance and offer very little room for flexibility. However, there are a wide variety of tactics within your arsenal of
marketing tools that can be deployed, both in advance of and after these events, to support calls to action that
drive your prospects to engage further with your online brand.
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© 2009 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.

5. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
Identify specific opportunities that support cross-promotion across your marketing initiatives
and channels.
Many of these tactics have already been identified and are currently scheduled within your marketing calendar.
Flag these specific tactics and focus your brainstorming efforts around how to position these events in such a way
that they create opportunities to link your cornerstone events together.
You may not have a large trade show presence. Perhaps you’re relying on a meticulously developed Webinar
series for which you’re offering one-off and series registration. The dates for that must be set far in advance to
make series registration work, so the same rules apply. You’ll have to work around that series.
Step #2: Identify and Refine CTAs
Once you have a strong understanding of your current initiatives, you can identify (or refine) simple calls to
action that can be leveraged to extend the conversation across promotion channels and drive your prospects
to conversion points. An effective CTA drives users to an offering or point of fulfillment where the promise is
delivered. Put in more simple terms, the call to action is the mechanism that links your promise (“Solve your issue
by learning more about topic A”) to the fulfillment of your value offering (a white paper on topic A).
In considering your calls to action, you must also consider the delivery vehicle. The delivery vehicle enables your
call to action to be positioned in front of your prospect. The purpose of the delivery vehicle is to provide context
and to create the promise of value that will be delivered. For example, a visitor to your corporate Web site may
be in the process of gathering product or service information and, as a result, will respond better to a call to
action driving to informational resources such as a resource library or a white paper. On the other hand, if your
prospects are visiting a themed microsite environment, they may respond best to CTAs driving to rich media or
experiential offerings.
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6. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
Calls to action may take the form of lower-value opt-in opportunities like “Subscribe to this newsletter” or higher
value offers such as surveys and assessments. For example, an organization that maintains a strong physical event
program by attending many trade shows will capture many prospects through face-to-face contact at their booth.
The trade show booth is the “vehicle” in this case. A prospect who discovers an organization in this high-value
environment may only take advantage of a call to action that drives to an offering of similar or higher value. This
may come in the form of a product trial or download, or even an invitation to a future, exclusive event. Lower touch
marketing activities such as e-mail or Web site impressions may require a less sophisticated and resource-intensive
effort to engage prospects with calls to action, because the expectations are different.
Calls to action that are commonly used to encourage activity among prospects can range from a simple “Add
to Cart” (in a BtoC commerce setting) or “Register” button, or can be as complex as an invitation to participate
in an online assessment. Some of the more common CTAs that are typical across a wide variety of Web
sites include:
Register Refer a colleague
Download Opt In/Opt out
Contact me View
Sign up Listen
Subscribe Visit
Examine sources of incremental media to fill gaps.
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Promotion_Planning V1 (03/2009)
© 2009 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.

7. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
Step #3: Fill in the Holes with Incremental Media Opportunities
Once you’ve identified opportunities to leverage calls to action across existing vehicles, you must now turn your
attention to the gaps in your program. You should consider all of these gaps as opportunities for incremental
media to bridge the gaps and keep up momentum. Incremental media can include third-party vendors such
as publications and trade associations. It can also include databases of content and channel partners. We
recommend assessing available incremental media in all of these forms. Don’t neglect to include partners and
associations that might provide good promotion channels without significant cost.
If you’re going to be working with a media vendor, selecting the right media vendor can be a daunting task. It’s
often helpful to deconstruct the task and begin by identifying the right mix of products to address the gaps in
your program. Today’s online media providers are constantly evolving their product offerings to differentiate
themselves and meet market demand. As a result, there are many more opportunities to purchase highly
customized offerings that are designed to impact very specific components of your program.
As you begin to evaluate the alternatives, you’ll discover that there are some media offerings that will be better
suited than others at meeting your specific program needs. For example, many media providers offer lead
guarantee programs where a specific number of leads are purchased and the provider has various means to
deliver them. These types of programs deliver real benefits in the form of “hands-off” management and certainty
of results.
List rentals provide an economical tool to fill the void, but must be carefully thought out or you may suffer
less than stellar results. Each of these tools can fill an appropriate place in your program. Ultimately their net
contribution to your overall acquisition goals will determine their suitability and ROI.
The core of this exercise is to define the specific type of media that will fulfill the needs of your program, and
identify relevant media providers for valuation. With your target set of media providers identified, group similar
offerings to easily support comparative vendor testing.
Test. Then Test Some More.
In my white paper, “Three Steps to Developing Effective Calls to Action,” (available at
www.bulldogsolutions.com/bulldogma) I refer to message testing to identify and refine resonant messages.
Testing also plays into a promotion plan. Testing and re-testing help to quantify performance goals and provide
the data needed to optimize the program. I advocate hypothesis testing, an approach that tends to prove or
disprove expected outcomes. It can be especially useful in helping to refine your portfolio of media providers.
When approaching an A/B split test, the desired outcome is to validate statistical performance of one message
over another where all other variables are held constant. In a similar manner, we can “pit” similar media
providers against one another to evaluate their respective performance over time. For example, consider a typical
media buy where a single vendor is used to provide a cross-section of media inventory. Splitting the budget
across multiple vendors can provide an opportunity for direct comparisons, since message, timing and, to a
certain extent, audience will be held constant. Once the campaign data has been collected, marketing decisions
can be made to evolve your program and determine the best place for your resources.
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8. Bulldog Solutions
Promotion Planning: Maximize Your Marketing Calendar
by Making Every Channel Count
It goes without saying however, that vendor testing programs often require more time and fiscal resources to fully
execute. So why bother? Simply put, media vendors have a single asset that is under continual pressure from
monetization activity. While each
vendor is different, there are some
certainties with regards to
list-based e-mail marketing. Over
time, mismanagement of a list
through inactivity, over-activity,
stagnation and attrition will drive
decreased performance over time
and negatively impact the cost per
lead of your programs. A list that once
performed well for you might change
over time. The onus is upon BtoB
marketers to proactively manage this
reality and continually optimize the
vendor portfolio. Test different media vendors to evaluate their respective
performance over time.
Conclusion
Building an effective promotion roadmap for online marketing means going beyond a series of individual media
buys driving to one specific call to action. The three steps outlined in this white paper will help you move toward a
comprehensive plan that incorporates all of your online marketing activities and leverages opportunities to
cross-promote through various channels and build on existing traffic.
Ahmed Taleb is Senior Director of Strategic Planning at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and
management company. Visit www.bulldogsolutions.com or e-mail info@bulldogsolutions.com to learn more.
www.bulldogsolutions.com
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© 2009 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.