Sometimes the best Internet marketing plans involve taking advantage of a little luck.
Last month, the marketing world was abuzz with how Chevrolet quickly turned a gaffe by a regional zone manager in Kansas City during the presentation of a 2015 Chevy Colorado pickup truck to World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner Wednesday night into a clever tagline, making lemonade out of a social media meme that easily could have gone the other way.
“Chevy’s Rikk Wilde ‘looked down at his notes often, spoke haltingly and explained to the pitcher that he’d like the Colorado … because it has ‘class-winning and leading, you know, technology and stuff,’” James R. Healey reports in USA Today.
The mistake was turned around by the company and used as a clever marketing campaign.
“The nervous Wilde was assured this morning he still has a job,” Greg Gardner and Alisa Priddle reported in the Detroit Free Press last evening. “And in fact he appears to have garnered millions in free publicity for the Chevrolet brand, which has received at least $2.4 million in media exposure from the unconventional presentation, according to Front Row Analytics. Bloomberg reports that is six times more than the $392,000 it would have brought in with a more polished performance.”
Chevy posted the #technologyandstuff hashtag on Twitter and made fun of itself in an effort to get its name out even more.
As for Wilde, he was assured the next day that he still had his job.
“Wilde got the phone call from his big boss at General Motors,” according to the AP’s account. “The Chevy leadership team called and told him he did nothing wrong. It’s all good. Everyone here has his back,” Michael Albano, the brand’s top spokesman, said.
“He was on message. The truck has technology and stuff. We will use that term and stuff,” Albano added.
And it already has. “Later Thursday, it released to media videos of the Colorado with the headline “You Know You Want a Truck with Technology and Stuff,’” Jim Lynch reports in the Detroit News.
“It’s a move right out of the playbook Code and Theory executives Dan Gardner and Steve Baer advocated in an Advertising Agepiece earlier this month in advising marketers to “make more like publishers and adopt a truly responsive philosophy,” wrote Thomas Forbes in an article for Media Post.
Deeper down, they write: “Companies that succeed in this world have the courage to organize their content marketing operations like newsrooms. In addition to planning campaigns months in advance, they empower their strategists to behave like editors and publish reactively and quickly.”
When it comes to your career college, you might be waiting a long time if you are looking for your “golden opportunity.” That’s why its still important to have a Internet marketing strategy in place.
Now is the perfect time to increase your use of Internet marketing, if for no other reason that your competitors most likely already are. Career Colleges are finding success in using digital marketing strategies to recruit more students, and Paradigm Media has had lots of success helping schools find unique strategies for getting their message out to potential students.
Achieving a personalized strategy to marketing can be challenging, which is why many career colleges and trade schools and looked to Paradigm Media to help develop an effective plan. A successful Internet marketing plan means not only getting your message in front of prospective students, but engaging them in such a way that they seek out additional information.
Personalization involves more than just an understanding of stats and trends. It requires an understanding of what your specific goals are and how to connect trends with your goals. At Paradigm Media we work to create an Internet marketing plan that is unique to your school and helps promote your message to the exact demographics you are trying to reach.
The first step is to understand what your goals are, followed by understanding what demographics you need to reach. That’s followed by a strategy and plan that is specialized for your career college that is designed to get results.