[MUSIC] Occasionally, when you present your social marketing program to senior management, it is met with a lukewarm reception. Maybe they don't like the cost of the program. Maybe they feel it is too risky, or maybe they doubt the accuracy of your forecast. Whatever the reason, you need a way to convince them to at least try the program, to see its benefits. This is where a pilot project comes in handy. It serves as a proof of concept. You are just taking a portion of the program and implementing it. If it meets the scenarios you used to build the entire program, it will show them the validity of developing the whole strategy. Often, when you move to build a community site, your competition will react. By starting with the fast to market pilot program, you can position your community contribution in the minds of your high-value market, and then build it out after they show you their interest. As Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, a book that I use in my class describes it, you build the MVP, minimum viable product, to grab the market and then enhance it to build out the entire program. It also identifies risks. With a well constructed pilot you can show the accuracy of your plan, and if required, make quick changes to hit your forecast. A pilot program allows you to gauge actual performance and make adjustments before you commit to the entire plan. In addition, the smaller scope of the pilot is often useful if you are resource-strapped. For a start-up or a company with a small IT or marketing budget, a pilot project is a great way to show management it will work. Once a pilot succeeds, you could quickly invest to build out the rest of the private community or nurture program. There are three ways to develop a pilot project. Which one you select depends on the market you are engaging, the type of investment required for the empowering concept and the concerns expressed by senior management. The first is to reduce the scope of the original plan. To accomplish this, you take your one-year plan and eliminate the non-essential parts of the program. For example, in a social IMC program you need the landing page and registration system, the empowering concept, the profile for each member of the community and some type of marketing program to bring them to your site. However, we could reduce the cost by minimizing the number of articles and videos we develop for the site, and well as some of the gamification elements, forums, and other engagement system. The key is to reduce the size and scope of the original plan. We still keep every step in a performance funnel, but we execute it at a lower cost. Once we know the pilot is on plan, we can increase investment to add back in these other elements. A second strategy is to reduce the timing of the program. If your program was to have quarterly webinars for a year as your empowering concept, you could create a pilot program with only the first webinar. This reduces your program budget by half or more. Once you know the webinar works as planned, you could add other webinars and more features as you roll out the program. These two strategies are the ones used by most companies today. But there is a third option, that is to reduce the breadth of the program. This option works well for business to business organizations. Rather than do a national or global program, you can focus it to a single geographical area like a city or a state. By focusing it, you can prove concept with minimal expense, as long as the targeted geography is projectable to the total market. This is a program developed by one of the teams in my Northwestern digital, social and mobile marketing class for a real client. Their empowering concept was quarterly webinars with several contests appropriate to the company and their market. They used a combination of traditional and social marketing to drive the program for a year. The estimated budget was just over $428,000. This is a pilot project. Notice the webinar has been reduced to one, and the contests are much smaller. The team also reduced the technology, staffing, and platform costs to reflect the three-month scope of the pilot. It reduces the total cost to $240,000. Why isn't it one quarter of the total budget? Because the technology costs and marketing costs must be maintained to ensure the launches of success. The team might have eliminated some of the marketing costs, but in this instance chose not to make that reduction. When the team presented this pilot to their client, they accepted it to approve the concept of the program. As it started it was quickly evident the program was performing at the levels forecasted in the performance funnel. So the client decided to quickly develop the full plan, which is still running today. To prove concept, they developed this $81,000 budget. This pilot program, like the full program, was for a whole year. The difference, the pilot project was only for the Chicago area, the geography where the corporate headquarters are located. By focusing on a specific area, they were able to reduce many of the budget elements. For this client, the pilot would work because they were a regional company. For many situations, you need to be sure the smaller territory represent your total market for this type of a pilot to work. A pilot program has a very specific function. It is to prove a concept. When you use it, monitor your performance funnels, to learn how the market is reacting to your program. If it is working through the first few steps in the performance funnel, talk with senior management about moving forward with the entire plan. The quicker, the better. The one risk you have with the pilot program is that it is often just a part of the entire community you want to build. By starting with the partial community, you run the risk of losing your members if there is too little content. If they are coming to the landing page according to plan, the level of performance justifies building the rest of the community. Use the pilot to quickly get to market and to prove concept. It can give you an edge over the competition. And a great way to convince senior management of the validity of your social marketing program. [MUSIC]
