Warrillow Weekly published a lemonade-cool successful marketing case study—complete with budget.
The bank’s Marketing EVP used traditional tactics in a (good, old fashioned) integrated marketing campaign to generate leads: opt-in email, signage, give-aways, cold hard cash and radio spots.
This marketing budget/execution example has useful lessons for small businesses, even if your marketing budget is no where near the size of Umpqua Bank:
- they really tuned into their small business owner prospects
- they used a ‘personas’ approach because they knew their target customers have young children
- they applied tons of creativity
Here is the complete story published in Warrillow Weekly:
Compare your cost to acquire 1 small business customer
What is a reasonable return on a marketing investment targeting small business?
Umpqua Bank landed 1500 new accounts by investing $830,000 in an initiative targeting small businesses in the Pacific Northwest. The campaign set out to position Umpqua as the bank for local businesses of any size. Umpqua was targeting small business owners and used a novel “center of influence” to reach them: their kids. Umpqua offered their prospects’ children a lemonade stand how-to kit and $10 in start-up capital.
They called the initiative “The Lemonaire” and it was aimed at kids and their entrepreneurial parents in the 96 cities where Umpqua operates its 144 branches. Lani Hayward, EVP Creative Strategies for Umpqua, invested her $830,000 marketing budget in an integrated, locally focused campaign. She bought local newspapers like The Oregonian in Portland and complemented the newspaper advertising with local market radio spots. She did an email blast to Umpqua “opt ins” and leveraged the Umpqua “stores” by displaying signage, etc.
Depending on your industry, you may look at the $553 cost per account acquired as extremely good or horribly inefficient. Keep in mind that banks can afford to invest a significant sum in each account acquired because the customer represents both business and consumer opportunities for a wide range of financial services products over their lifetime. Switching banks is such a hassle that, once a business customer starts with a bank, they stay. Sprinkle in the good will and local buzz Umpqua generated from this feel-good campaign (the lemonade stand kits included the booklet “How to Become a Lemonaire: A Guide to Starting Your First Small Business”, a sign for the stand, cups, napkins, a tablecloth and a crisp $10 bill), and the $553 per account acquired starts to look good.
Source: Warrillow Weekly January 29, 2008
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