For this simulation I was given the role of creating campaigns for Buhi’s new line of JuxtaSmart Luggage. My responsibilities were to identify the companies’ target personas and create campaigns to achieve our revenue goal. I was able to spread these campaigns out over the course of eight quarters or two years. I was given a campaign budget of $500,000 per quarter to achieve our Year 2 Quarter 4 goal of $45,700,000 in revenue. My goal with these campaigns was to move our target personas through each of the four stages of the marketing funnel: Awareness/Interest, Consideration/Intent, Purchase, and Loyalty. I was to use the resources that were given to me to identify the appropriate campaigns to launch each quarter, and what type of content to use for each stage of the funnel, while staying within budget.
For my first quarter, I decided to run two awareness campaigns and two consideration campaigns. I was able to drive awareness up 5% for Back-to-School Mindy and only 2% for Up-and-Comer Raj. I had much better success with my awareness campaigns where I was able to increase awareness 11% for City-Hopper Sue and 17% for Seaside Sally. Overall I realized that I was behind on expected revenue so I knew I had to aim to increase it in the following quarters.
The first round also gave me insight as to which options were working and which were not. For my awareness campaigns I realized that social media and blogging were working the best, while mobile marketing did not work for me.
Over the course of the first four quarters I decided to continue to run awareness and consideration campaigns in the effort to move as many target personas to the consideration stage before ultimately moving them to the purchase stage. By the fourth quarter I was able to increase the awareness for City-Hopper Sue to 67%, Back-to-School Mindy to 59%, Up-and-Comer Raj to 63%, and Seaside Sally to 52%.
By the end of the fourth quarter I realized that my actual revenue (the blue line) was still running short of the expected revenue (the green line) so I knew that I needed to start working on moving my personas to the purchase stage.
Year two, quarter two I created a purchase campaign for Seaside Sally after identifying that she was most likely to purchase in Quarter 2. I decided to try out a few different options and had good success with all of them with the most successful being mobile marketing, e-books, and SMS texts. Through this campaign I achieved a 6% increase in the purchasing stage for this persona. For the other personas I decided to continue to create consideration campaigns and move them onto the purchase stage over the next two quarters.
After quarter two my variance in revenue had increased, but my quarter growth was the highest it has been. I realized that this must have been due to launching a purchasing campaign during the correct time so over the next two quarters I knew I had to continue to create purchasing campaigns specifically for the personas that were most likely to purchase.
For my final quarter of the simulation, I decided to run a loyalty campaigns for City-Hopper Sue, which increased her loyalty by 1%. I also ran a purchase campaign for Seaside Sally after noticing she was most likely to buy in the fourth quarter, and increased her purchase stage by 4%.
Although I did not hit my expected revenue over the last two rounds, I was able to start decreasing the variance.
Throughout the simulation I seemed to be doing poorly up until quarter two of year two. Although I felt like I was choosing the best marketing options for each campaign type, I think my biggest challenge was identifying when to launch a campaign for each specific stage of the marketing funnel. I went in with the strategy of slowly moving from the awareness stage to the loyalty stage over the course of two years. If I was able to do it over again I would focus on the quarters each persona was most likely to purchase in year one, and create purchasing campaigns during those quarters. I am glad that by the end I was able to start figuring out the mistakes I was making and start improving my revenue variance. If I had a year three, I believe that I would be able to continue making improvements to ultimately reach my goal.
Overall, I feel this simulation was an extremely beneficial experience in inbound marketing. I was able to learn hands on through trial and error and I will be able to apply what I’ve learned in the future.