Long after their employees have gone home for the day, most business owners are still hard at work.
They may be tinkering with the company’s website, solving shipping problems, writing marketing plans, dealing with personnel matters or ordering materials. The to-do list of many owners of small and medium sized business is longer than the hours in a day.
To grab the attention of its time-crunched target audience, Productivity Alberta has enlisted the expertise of RED The Agency – a marketing firm with offices in Vancouver and Edmonton. This February, the company launched the first phase of an awareness campaign, zeroing in on social media like LinkedIn, e-mail marketing and business print publications, such as Alberta Venture and Canadian Business.
With numerous awards to its credit and a client roster that includes Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club and Canadian Western Bank, RED’s track record is well known. But Productivity Alberta’s campaign was a unique challenge, admits RED Partner and Director of Strategy Randy Cronin.
“Entrepreneurs are going in 20 different directions and trying to stay on top of their businesses. It’s hard to stop the world and get them to pay attention to productivity,” he says.
Before the launch of the campaign, RED consulted with members of Productivity Alberta’s target audience, business owners in a wide range of industry sectors. It quickly became apparent that RED would have to do something provocative to catch the attention of business owners. “You have to get under their skin a little,” says Cronin.
Productivity is a concept, and not a product; selling it seemed like a tall order. So RED started boning up. Cronin was surprised to learn that in a typical business day, only eight minutes are profitable. “That’s quite shocking, and you go, ‘Is that true? That can’t apply to my business!’ ”
Cronin and his team decided to zero in on these stomach-churning facts and use unexpected visual strategies to engage business owners, such as positioning some of the ad copy upside-down on the page.
All of the advertisements involved in the campaign are geared to driving traffic to surveys at micro-sites such as thinkproductivity.ca, and ultimately to productivityalberta.ca, which has range of resources, including assessment tools, to help entrepreneurs begin to explore the meaning of productivity.
The resources are geared to businesses of all sizes, and both new and established entrepreneurs – including those who may think they’re working as productively as they can. Most business owners aren’t aware that there’s more they could be doing, says Cronin. “It goes way beyond the ‘Do more with less’ that most business people subscribe to.”
There’s no better time for businesses to start evaluating and improving their productivity. Operating as efficiently as possible helps businesses survive – and thrive – during lean times. Improving productivity also helps companies compete in an increasingly global market, says Cronin. This is critical for maintaining a healthy economy – with plenty of job opportunities – for all Albertans.
The first leg of the campaign winds down at the end of April, and RED will do follow-up research to gauge the reaction, before planning the next phase. Focus groups during campaign development predict that the messages will resonate – as does the RED Agency’s own reaction.
Since collaborating with Productivity Alberta, the marketing firm has turned the productivity lens on itself, cutting back on their operating costs and more evenly dividing the company’s workload across staff members, explains Cronin. “It’s paid off for us significantly – surprisingly so.”
For more information RED The Agency, visit their website
