Do More With Less: Scrappy Marketing Stories To Fuel Your Creative Engine

September 18, 2019
Written by Klaudia Tirico
Published in Blog

Here at Demand Gen Report, we’re constantly highlighting B2B marketing case studies of carefully and thoroughly planned out campaigns. These large ideas take a lot of time and effort from all aspects of the organization to come to life, but let’s face it, sometimes marketers just don’t have the time and bandwidth to develop large campaigns on top of large campaigns on a regular basis.

That’s where scrappy marketing comes in. While the term may mean different things to different people, it essentially means doing more with less. Sometimes being a little unpolished can really go a long way.

If you’re lacking in time and resources but still want to achieve some killer results, it might be time to dabble in scrappy marketing. Below, we’ll highlight two examples of successful scrappiness to fuel your creative engine.

PGi Maximizes Impact From A Single Piece Of Content

A turnkey approach to scrappy marketing is to take a large E-book or white paper and develop a complete content campaign around it. Not only does it save time and effort, but it also allows your organization to deliver thought-leadership content to audiences with various consumption preferences (because not everyone wants to read a 30-page white paper in their free time).

A great example of this is PGi, who wanted to maximize the reach and impact of its annual influencer E-book. Working with Content4Demand, a B2B content strategy and creative agency, the company simply took the foundational trends and takeaways from the book and developed smaller assets, such as a promotional social video, infographic, brief and three articles published on the company website.

“[PGi’s] goal was to bring as many people from different vehicles from different channels to that piece as possible,” said Alicia Esposito, Senior Content Strategist at Content4Demand. “So, all of the derivative content that we created from the get-go was designed to be just intriguing enough, without giving away all the information, because we wanted to bring people to that foundational piece.”

According to Esposito, the team was able to turn the content around within a month after the core E-book was finalized.

“If you have aggressive leads and goals and you want a big piece like that [E-book], invest your time upfront in that planning process and determine what's realistic and what's required for edits and approvals, especially when including influencers,” said Esposito. “Then the scrappy marketing comes in, and you think about how quickly and easily you can break it down into different formats and the different amplification channels.”

Devex Turns Webinars Into Conference Calls

When it comes to content formats, webinars might be one of the most difficult to develop on a scrappy level. After all, producing, promoting and executing structured, hour-long panel style webinars with thought leaders and an extensive PowerPoint presentation can’t be done overnight. While these are the types of webinars Devex, a media platform for the global development community, was used to creating, they decided to flip that model on its head by creating shorter “conference call-type” webinars that packed a lot of punch with little effort.

“As a media company, we often have breaking news stories that would definitely be worthy of a digital event… IF we had the time to put one together,” said Olivia Chapman, Digital Producer at Devex, in a conversation with ON24. “As a solution, we came up with a “conference call” vs “webinar” distinction. The conference call is just 30 minutes long; and instead of a series of presentations via slide deck, the speakers on the “call” simply broadcast their audio conversation about a topic, informed by audience questions submitted in advance and during the live event.”

Aside from being fun and easy to market, the conference call webinars have increased event output, as the company is able to put the events together in a few days in response to breaking news. They are also easier to sell to busy presenters who don’t always have the time to put together large presentations and slide shows.