What You Need to Know About the RCM VIP Days
If you follow our social channels, chances are you’ve come across our VIP Days. Recently we debuted two exclusive VIP Days, a Marketing VIP Day, and a Social Media VIP Day. Since then, we’ve had an overwhelming response from our followers, inquiring about this opportunity.
Questions include what they are, what the experience looks like, and what the outputs are. We are answering all those questions and more to get you all excited about the possibilities our VIP Days could bring.
What is a VIP Day?
This is a great question! Although we love the term… we didn’t create it. A VIP Day is essentially a day (or in our case, two half days) where an individual or team works exclusively on your brand, to give you an accelerated output. There are all different types of VIP Days, from overall business strategy, to strategy specifically for one channel. At RCM, our VIP Days currently focus on marketing strategy and social media strategy.
How Does the VIP Day Work?
The Application Process
Let us take you on a walkthrough of the VIP Day process. We will do this with our Marketing VIP Day, since it’s more granular, but the process is quite similar for both types of days.
The first step is to apply. Once someone is comfortable enough with our VIP Day offering and really wants to know if the experience could be a good fit for their company, all they have to do is apply on our VIP website. The application page asks some basic questions, such as company name and website, but it also asks more in-depth questions about marketing. Questions related to marketing goals, challenges, and current marketing efforts help our team get a deeper understanding if your company is the right fit for this program. It’s important to note that this exclusive program isn’t for everyone and that being able to integrate the marketing strategy (more to come on that later) right away is integral to the program’s success.
Once someone applies, we will spend the next day or two reviewing their application. If an applicant looks like they could be a good fit for the program, we will send an email with a link to book a discovery call. The discovery call is a half-hour-long video call where we go a little more in-depth about the marketing goals, challenges, and current efforts. This call both our team and the applicant determine if it’s the right program, or if they would benefit from another kind of marketing support. It also allows us to gather valuable background information on the applicant’s company that will help us during the VIP Day.
If, after the discovery call, both us and the applicant feel the VIP Day is the right move, we will send over a link to book the big day!
The VIP Day - Day 1
Once the application process is complete, it’s time for the VIP Day. For the purpose of this blog, we will go through the Marketing VIP Day in depth, but note that the Social Media VIP Day works similarly, but has different modules and outputs.
As mentioned earlier, the Marketing VIP Day is actually 2 half days. This ensures that the brands we work with still get an accelerated and exclusive experience, but also one that isn’t too overwhelming. Each day lasts about 4 to 5 hours.
So, let’s start with day 1. We’ll begin with some background and due diligence. This ensures we have all the information we need before we hit the ground running. During this time, we will review all of the information that has been received from the brand we are working with (including any current marketing efforts and materials). We will also review our own independent research on external influences, the economic market, and trends affecting the industry that we conducted prior to the call.
Once the background and due diligence is taken care of, we will move on to competitive positioning. A great way to ensure you’re reaching the right audience in the right way is to take a look at what competitors are doing. This part of the VIP Day involves highlighting strategic points from key competitors, including offers, positioning and more. We will also do whitespace position mapping to identify areas of opportunity and to see how the brand we’re working with fits in with its competitors.
Next, we will move on to the target audience and customer journey. We will start tackling this by clearly identifying primary and secondary (if relevant) target audiences. This will include demographics, psychographics, motivations and need states. We may also develop a “day in the life” profile. This could include what the main target does at each point during the day, the media they’re engaging with at each touchpoint, and more. Finally, we will draft a user journey identifying need states. This process will ensure we know the target audience in detail and therefore will know how to reach them.
Now, we can create an amazing plan, but, once the plan is implemented, how will we know whether or not it was successful? That’s where our next step comes in: quantitative and qualitative objectives. These objectives will clearly outline what we are trying to achieve. We will work to create ambitious, yet realistic goals. This will also include identifications of key performance indicators (KPIs) that we will use to measure success. It’s important that these KPIs are clearly defined so that there’s no confusion down the road.
Once we have the goals figured out, it’s time to move on to strategy. How are we going to achieve the goals? What is currently within our reach for immediate wins? What’s a longer-term play? These are questions that will be answered as we put our heads down and craft a strategy that is built for success.
The final piece of day 1 is budgeting. We will work with the brand to create budgeting guidelines that will ensure the success of the strategy within a budget that is reasonable for the brand.
The VIP Day - Day 2
Although it may seem like we covered a lot in day 1 - and we did! - we’re not quite finished yet! Day 2 will begin with a review of day 1. This will ensure everyone is on the same page before we kick-start day 2.
Once we make sure everyone is on the same page, we will move on to developing the marketing funnel. During this time, we will determine what each stage of the funnel looks like, how we will get prospects into the funnel, and how to guide these prospects through the different stages in order to keep moving them down the funnel.
Next, we will move on to the development of a 12-month tactical plan. An approach we often take is using the PESO model, which stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned, highlighting the different types of media that are essential in a sound strategy. Although this model was originally created for PR, it has been adapted for use in marketing and we believe it absolutely has a place in creating a successful marketing strategy. It doesn’t necessarily mean there are tactics for each phase - it’ll depend on your brand and your goals - however it does ensure that all areas are considered. This part of the process will also involve the creation of a marketing framework to align on objectives, approach, key messages, tactics and KPIs.
Now it’s time to develop a messaging framework. There are few things more important to a successful brand, than messaging. How brands communicate their offering is absolutely key for marketing success. During this step of the process, we will determine how the brand should convey benefits, talk about their products, and more. While this is only one paragraph in our blog post, it arguably could be the most important one!
Once the tactical plan and messaging are in a good spot, we will move on to creating a marketing ecosystem. This proven framework will identify the role of each tactic and clearly outline the next best action. Think of this sort of like your plan on a page.
We’ll close off the second day by doing some more work on analytics and KPIs. After all, tracking is hugely important in order to determine success. We will clearly outline how to track and review at various stages of the plan.
Post- VIP Day
After the transformative VIP Day, we will take a day or two to package up all the assets, templates and content we collectively created, and hand it over in a Google Drive. However that’s not all!
Included with the VIP Day is 2 weeks of post-VIP Day email support that starts the day you receive all your assets. The email support provides a great opportunity for companies to ask questions or get clarification as they begin implementing the tactical plan.
What Do You Actually Get from a VIP Day?
So, in the previous section, we gave you a lot to think about. But, some of you may be wondering, what the outputs from the VIP Day actually look like. Again, for this example, we will talk about the Marketing VIP Day, but know that the Social Media VIP Day has its own outputs.
After the first day of the Marketing VIP Day, your team will walk away with a communications framework, target audience profiles (this includes the day in the life and user journey), and budgeting guidelines.
After the second day of the Marketing VIP Day, your team will walk away with a complete Marketing Funnel, a marketing framework, messaging framework, ecosystem, analytics guidelines, and a roadmap for how to implement the 12-month tactical plan. Finally, we will also provide the video recordings of our calls together so you can rewatch them at your leisure.
All of these assets will be provided in a Google Drive folder so your team can easily access them during implementation.
So What Are You Waiting For?
Does this sound like it could be a good fit for your company? Or for someone you know? You can learn more and apply for the Marketing VIP Day here, and learn more and apply for the Social Media VIP Day here. And, of course, you can always reach out to us at info@redcatmarketing.ca if you have any questions.
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