Inventing a Co-op Marketing Program
CHALLENGE
We were pitching for a significant client's business. The task given to me was to build a solution that would streamline and support BVK and West Virgnia's Coop Program. The aspects of selling media advertising opportunities are time consuming and daunting for end-users. The need to work closely with industry leaders is held in tension with optimizing diverse media channels including broadcast TV, radio, print, digital banners, paid searches, and social media posts.
RESULTS
In its inaugural year, the WVTO Cooperative Advertising Program was adopted by a large majority of its industry partners with over 60 participants, of which more than 40 participated as a multi-partner coalition.
COOP was a FINALIST for National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards, Industry and Strategic Partnerships.
Judges loved seeing West Virginia learn from the overall campaign. Judges awarded West Virginia as a finalist as it created a seamless way to manage the branding for all participants, creating multiple levels of participation, and kept the message consistent.
This same partner indicated they exceeded their 7.5% annual growth goal and increased sales by 9.8%.
These seasonal initiatives resulted in:
~ 1.4 M placements secured partner investments, with WVTO’s dollar-for-dollar match
~ 2.8M total co-op media investment.
~ 190M impressions netted from spend for the co-op partners.
Invent and build the product from scratch.
We wanted to create a brand portal, sell templates through an e-commerce platform for our customers/we thought building a brand portal was a really cool opportunity to add revenue to our business from a brand like Subway/United Way etc that had satellite offices and needed a solution to keep marketing on brand...but we didn’t know how to do it or if it was possible
Identified a clear opportunity that solved a problem and launch a market-leading product. I pioneered building the tool and had to educate non-tech leaders through the process of building a SAAS tool as well as the MVP + sprint process to test, pivot and validate.
Identifying a clear opportunity to solve a customer Problem - WHY were we building this tool ? What problem was it solving? Why were we trying to sell templates? How were we going to make revenue?
We disagreed about building an e-commerce platform with a third-party tools like Mangento and printUI because of the complexity involved with various third- party dependencies and security compliance.
Diving into the data and competitive landscape:
I conducted studies on various asset management systems and product offerings that included, web-dam, market port, google asset management systems, print UI, Tailor brands and Canva as well as feature comparisons and finding a way to simplify the tool. I started identifying subscription models. Google's asset management platform was a game changer offered solutions for smaller organizations.
A nimble solution with a long-term goal:
I inspired the way to build and disrupt the competitive landscape by offering a tool that would support our business work flow and our customers by offering a Nimble solution.
I decided to commit to the challenge, build the platform from scratch with an offshore team in India. I knew this was a big undertaking for an ad agency.
I lead the design, concept and MVP and we decided to test the MVP with United Way. We needed to find out, if this was a potential solution and presented the idea to several clients.
We were able to go-to-market quickly with a clickable mock up and fully developed MVP.
Results:
West Virginia, Moffit and Bryant & Stratton College jumped on board!
Empathising with our users and business needs.
I had to understand and empathize with various stakeholders from our internal media team, VP of Tourism, our clients as administrators as well as well as our client's users - partners.
I mapped the user Journey and tasks.
Strategically built out an MVP
Building the CO-OP and Testing the Market
I created a seamless experience for partners to shop
Shopping for Media
