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| Like This But Less Fun |
Stay in the marketing and advertising game long enough, and you're going to have some bad days. Here's what I learned from one of my worst. Hopefully, it will benefit you, in the long run, as much as it has me.
In one of my first marketing jobs in my '20s, I worked for a custom music manufacturer as my day job, while trying to get signed as the leader of a rock and roll band in my nights and weekends. One of the manufacturer's best lead generation devices was a technical book for recording studios. It was great info, and absolutely free, but you had to give up your name, and it wouldn't be of any value to you, unless you had a recording studio. Genius marketing, and one of the company's best long-term generators of high quality leads.
Looking to replicate that success, I pitched management on a new book, one that I would write, which would be for indie bands when they were outside of the studio. I pulled together everything I had learned (the hard way) about booking gigs, selling merch, gaining radio play, working with managers and attorneys, and what to look out for in regards to recording company deals. I enlisted co-workers to share what they knew, got a great design from one of our in-house people... and then the hard part really began. .
The biggest point for me, in making the book, was to get distribution and publicity that we didn't have to pay for. So I started pitching mail order music instrument vendors on a co-promotional marketing deal. Slip a postcard advertising our book into your shipments of recording studio equipment. In return, we'll give you signage on the book and other considerations, and we'll get access to fresh leads. As we were one of the bigger players in our space, with nationwide service and a constant presence at trade shows and talent showcases, we were able to work out a deal with one of the bigger providers. It took a lot of time and negotiation, but the deal happened, and now I needed to get my management to sign off on production.
Since the vendor sold a great deal of gear, and since it's difficult to say with complete certainty what gear will be used in a studio and which will not, we had to print and ship a truly intense amount of postcards... across the country, at our cost, and for an unknown quality of leads. To try to limit the outlay, we ran the job on remnant paper, got our in-house people to shepherd the job piecemeal, and shipped a year's worth of postcards (the final count was, I believe, over seven figures) out by cheap and slow freight. All told, the project took nearly six months from start to finish, and was a major undertaking for a lot of people.
The postcard dropped. Our call center began to ring. Mail started to pile up.
And that's when we finally, awfully, tragically discovered... that one of the three inclusions of our phone number, on the postcard, was wrong. (A 3, when it was supposed to be an 8.)
The wrong number turned out to be for an unused department of an insurance company in Canada. Missing the typo wasn't just on me, since there was a half dozen people on the project. There was no way to fix the problem with fresh print, as we were already into our busy season, and there was no printing capacity, or management interest, in doing a reprint. But this was my baby, so I just owned it. I took full responsibility, apologized, and thought about offering my resignation.
My manager then took the opportunity to be great. He talked me down out of my panic, got on the horn with the insurance company, and worked out a manufacturing trade for them to transfer the number to us for a couple of years. Within a couple of weeks, the wrong number was ringing in our call center.
To finish the story... we fixed the film for any future reprints. The insertion turned out to be a mixed bag, as the cost per lead was low, but so was the quality of the prospects. And I learned to stare down creative for errors as if I were checking a mine field, for the rest of my life. Because, well, that's really what they are.
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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.
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