With consumers being forever bombarded with advertising, and lead gen forms all the more popular yet equally uncompelling, every solid media plan revolves around one key factor: the source mix. But I find equally as important as source mix is medium mix. Like a mad scientist, I write my plans with a little email here, a little banner there, and a dash of co-reg. But it is with this last piece that I find the most problems.
Co-reg is perceived one of two ways: a waste of money or the only sure way to get volume. In other words, those who approve your media plan (or at least signing off on it) will always try to block co-reg buys because they believe it will never work or you are being lazy. And the truth is those elements do come into play but your best media buyers and consumer marketers can prove their worth with their co-reg buys.
The co-reg campaign comes in two pieces-the buying and the marketing. The key to navigating the buy component is frequency cap and pricing. Keeping in mind your key metrics, you cannot approach a co-reg like a standard CPL. Problem is Georgia McGreen is also buying co-reg for her company and will buy without regard to the ROI, making it seemingly impossible to get a deal in place with the parameters needed to make it work for me. Luckily my always favorite co-reg sales folks are starting to realize that Ms McGreen cannot make long term relationships because she will shortly be out of work (reference lack of ROI understanding) but strong media buyers can and will make long term campaigns happen.
Next comes the marketing. Co-reg is a viable piece to any media buy, but it has to be planned and monitored with the utmost care. Co-reg campaigns also require their own campaign strategy. You cannot just buy a co-reg user and dump them into your email cycle. These users do not have the same brand connection other users have. Often they have no idea who you are and why you are emailing them. You need to love them a little more and handle them with a different set of gloves than your other consumers. Unique introduction messages (rather an generic auto-responders), careful timing and relevant emails are vital to making a co-reg campaign work. Here more than anywhere else creative and thoughtful marketing messages will get you far.
If priced correctly and marketed to with the right set of messages, co-reg can be a huge success for any lead gen media campaign but be warned-its not for the faint of heart.
