On July 12th, 2008, our client, the Upper Pemigewasset Historical Society (UPHS) held the first “Ways of the Woods” event at the Lincoln Village Shops in Lincoln, NH. The event, which focused on the impact of the northern forest on the communities and history of the area, saw over 500 visitors through its exhibit.

TotalScope was employed by the UPHS to market this event on a low budget, and was successful in doing so, using cost-effective advertising techniques. The goals were to generate event visitors, new UPHS members, and revenue for the UPHS. TotalScope wrote and distributed multiple press releases, took advantage of free event listings on a number of high-traffic New Hampshire websites, created flyers, posters, and html emails, and leveraged the event visitors for mailing list registrations.

The following is a sample of the graphic work that was completed:
Ways of the Woods Flyer, by TotalScope
Ways of the Woods HTML Email, by TotalScope

TotalScope has ammassed a list of exceptional websites that offer free event listings. When utilized correctly, these free listings can give a boost to a campaign in 2 ways.

1. The website will advertise your event and generate direct referral traffic to your website.
2. Often, the link back to your website improves your popularity with the search engines.

This project was the perfect example of how low-cost measures can be employed to generate qualified visitors, whether to an event, or to a website. Often, “time” is the more challenged resource. In this case, 500 visitors were brought to an event in Lincoln, NH in under 1 month’s time. For more information, feel free to Contact Us.

You fought very hard in your organization to build in a reasonable budget for your e-marketing initiatives. Now, as a result of the “budget re-forecasting meeting”, you’ve been told that sales projections for the second quarter are off by 30% and now you must cut the “fat” from your expense budget by that amount to meet your department goals. You walk away from the meeting with your head down, wondering how you are going to continue the progress you’ve made with your website marketing. There goes the $2/click you were paying on AdWords and the $5/lead you were paying your affiliates.

Here’s the good news: You’re not alone. Though there is no real “safety in numbers” in the e-marketing world, you can take advantage of this time to re-focus your effots, save some money, and leverage the down economy to gain a competetive advantage. Since every other organization competing for high-visibility, high-traffic media is cutting their budgets as well, you have an opportunity to renegotiate with your vendors, and potentially lock in better rates for your campaigns. Take a look at CPC rates for your keywords and see if they are still trending up. Ask your vendors for lower rates in lieu of canceling your I/O’s. And, work with your affiliates on scaling the payouts more toward benchmarked achievement. In other words, you don’t have to simply cut. You can re-negotiate.

This is also the time to focus on your user interface. If you have to cut the amount you spend on generating site traffic, focus on improving the traffic quality and resultant conversions. Take another look at the data and ask yourself what can be done to improve your conversion rates. Are there content areas that need further development? What site features could be implemented at little cost to improve the stickyness of the site? What are the fundamental changes that can be made to the conversion funnel to improve your cost per conversion. Even if you increase your conversion rates by a fraction of a point, you will have likely done it at a fraction of the cost.

Search for Free and/or inexpensive distribution channels. Are you working the social media sites like MySpace and YouTube? Are you feeding out your content with RSS or other syndication platforms? Are you blogging and chatting about your products/services? How are your email campaigns going? Have you mined your database for a segment that you’ve yet to reach? Have you called your grandma and asked her to mention your website at bingo? Seriously, you’ve got a little more time now to focus on these outlets since you can’t go for the mainstream.

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