Integrated Marketing Campaign:
CRI Year-End Tax Planning Webinars
Integrated Marketing Campaign—Carr, Riggs & Ingram: Year-End Tax Planning Webinars
Executive Summary
Purpose: The primary purpose of the integrated marketing campaign utilized to promote CRI’s first ever Year-End Planning webinars was to engage current clients and non-clients alike in order to encourage them to either attend one of our live webinars or to download a recording of one of the webinars. A secondary purpose of the campaign was to utilize our marketing resources in a way that would help us compete with similarly sized firms while catapulting us into the age of digital marketing. The Year-End Planning webinars themselves sought to educate both current and non-clients on how the new tax law changes enacted by the TCJA would impact both individual and business tax situations; to help clients and non-clients understand how the new tax law changes differ from historic tax laws; and to assist clients and non-clients in learning what actions needed to be taken before the 2018 year-end to optimize tax benefits.
Goals: CRI’s Year-End Planning webinars were created to not only engage and be a value-added service for current clients, but to increase overall awareness of CRI to those who had never previously heard of or engaged with CRI in a digital format, while also helping put CRI in a place of thought leadership regarding tax matters and the TCJA. This was the first major digital campaign that CRI launched to increase attendance for an event and awareness of our brand, with the end goals being driving attendance to the live webinars, bolstering recording downloads, promoting engagement at our local office levels, boosting internal communications, and creating internal efficiencies across our large firm.
Approach: To achieve the goals we set in place for the integrated marketing campaign for our Year-End Planning webinars, we employed a Google search campaign, targeted social campaigns, email marketing, our home page on our website, our website event calendar, local office digital signage, and flyers for both print and professional email invitation use.
Implementation
To implement this integrated marketing campaign, we employed the following:
Google Search Campaign—We broke our Google Search campaign down into 11 different ad groups consisting of over 40 different keywords.
Targeted social campaigns—Our Year-End Planning social campaigns ran on Facebook and LinkedIn, with a creative approach of targeting individuals who visited our website tax pages, as well as look-alike audiences (by Facebook’s definition).
Email Marketing—We advertised our Year-End Planning webinars in two separate monthly newsletter calls to action, to targeted lists derived from a previous tax event, and to our tax-focused email list.
Website home page
Website event calendar
Local office digital signage
Flyers for print and professional email invitation use
As our first firm-wide comprehensive digital push for an event, we chose these mediums and tactics to not only lay the foundation for future digital campaigns, but to put our firm on a level playing field amongst competitively sized firms, to bring our marketing efforts to current industry standards, and to ultimately modernize our overall marketing strategy.
RESULTS
CRI’s first major digital push had a very impressive outcome. The results of the Year-End Planning webinars integrated marketing campaign are as follows:
Webinar report: 614 registrants with 42% being non-clients
Google search campaign: over 59,000 people reached with over 2,400 clicks on our ads, and a 4.07% click-through-rate (industry average is 2.65%, per WordStream)
Social campaign: over 59,000 people reached with more than 105,000 impressions
E-Blasts: Open rate average of 39.6% and 6.2% click rate.
We had a rate of 42% non-clients register for our webinars, increasing awareness of the CRI brand, which was one of the primary goals of the campaign. We had roughly half of our 28 markets utilize the marketing efforts and presentation at the local level to gain interaction with clients and potential clients, and we were able to boost internal communications regarding marketing efforts for large events and campaigns. Additionally, we were able to increase our email open and click rates, build up our interactions on social media, and grow our CRI Tax Talk mailing list by 400%.
Project Team
CRI Marketing Department: Cheryl Hunt, Lauren Magli, Betsy McTee, Nathan Haynes, Kendal Diehl, Mary Alison Capps, Hallie Terral