A Strategic Approach to Integrated Marketing
See how this event planning company interweaves travel throughout its print and social media campaigns to drive creative marketing.
For Christy Lamagna, president of Strategic Meetings & Events, marketing isn’t just a way to get more customers; it’s an opportunity to showcase what her team does best and demonstrate their strategic, creative, and detail-oriented approach.
Lamagna partners with her clients to understand their goals for each event and create a communication strategy around that vision. These plans include things like designing and distributing marketing materials, such as posting flyers and brochures, sending gifts in the mail, and changing taglines and email signatures to generate buzz for the event. “We try to create an immersive experience not just during the event, but also in the months before and after, so we can really drive and document change,” she says.
For Strategic Meetings & Events, the baseline is perfection. That means attention to detail is paramount, whether marketing online or off, on behalf of a client or for her business’s own brand. To help her manage the company’s social media presence, which includes Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a blog, Lamagna hired a full-time employee. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she cautions. “I believe you should focus on what brings you joy and what you can do better than anyone else. You can’t do it all! Pick your lane, find other experts, and then get out of their way.”
For other marketing initiatives, she relies on her creative and logistic partner, her local The UPS Store in Chester, New Jersey, which is managed by Don Pollard. “It’s the smallest things that can make the greatest impression,” she says. “When you are a perfectionist like I am, you don’t trust a lot of people. I can trust Don. He understands that details matter.”
For example, when Strategic Meetings & Events ran a yearlong marketing campaign for a client that required printed pieces and gift items to go out at the same time each month to more than 300 recipients, The UPS Store assisted in getting the packages delivered on time and in pristine condition, even taking special care in the smallest details, like how the tissue paper was folded.
Pollard also handles other details that even Lamagna wouldn’t have thought of. “Don and his team collaborate on the perfect-size boxes, how each of the gift items is placed and packaged, the look of the labels and how they are positioned on the box, and even how the box opens,” she explains.
Double duty content
Initiatives like the yearlong mailing campaign allow Lamagna to demonstrate what sets her and her team apart. And while she generates a lot of new business from word of mouth, she also invests in thoughtful marketing campaigns for her own company. For example, Strategic Meetings & Events sent postcards to clients and prospects to showcase the team’s travels. The campaign was so popular, Lamagna went even bigger–literally–with a second-gen iteration: She worked with Pollard to create an oversized postcard with enough room to include recipes from the places the team visited.
Strategic Meetings & Events often turns its printed campaigns into content to share online, too, which allows the company to derive more value from every marketing piece. On social media, the company shares useful event-planning resources, photos, and videos of its events to create engaging and visually-appealing content. Lamagna also writes for industry publications and speaks frequently at conferences. These efforts help to establish her business as an expert in the space, and combine with the company’s print campaigns and stellar track record to help convert prospects to customers, and customers to repeat clients.
“Everything we do is strategic, and we want our marketing to reflect that,” says Lamagna. Together with her team, she makes sure her offline and online marketing initiatives work synergistically to showcase the company’s breadth of experience and devotion to detail.
