Today’s Marketing Cookie: An Example of Win-Win Marketing

Like most marketers, I am constantly on the lookout for and appreciate fine marketing wherever I see it.  I love it when I see genius reflected in someone’s marketing tactics or strategies. I love to see entertaining and informative marketing programs, well-written copy, great images.  They make me happy. Sound like a fortune cookie?  It should — we’re talking about Today’s Marketing Cookie.

This terrific content strategy is one I have been itching to write about and the perfect opportunity presented itself when we got Chinese take-out before the holidays and I got a nice goofy fortune — “You may be hungry soon – order takeout now!”  (We all got a good laugh out of it, almost as good as the “Ignore that last fortune” fortune my husband got recently. Several of my friends commented on the “upselling” strategy – various comments about striking while the wok was still hot.)

The blog Today’s Marketing Cookie solicits interesting fortunes (we all get them in our Chinese takeout orders, right?) and Myles Bristowe, the CMO of the company, blogs using the fortunes as inspiration.  Here’s what Myles wrote using the fortune I tweeted to him.  (Visibility opportunity #1.)  Myles responded enthusiastically back to my initial tweet to him. (Visibility opportunity #2.) Then he included my profile in his blog post.  (Visibility opportunity #3) Then he and his company tweeted about the blog post and included my Twitter handle. (Visibility opportunities #4 & #5.) Then others retweeted and reposted the message (Visibility opportunities #6-20ish)

That’s right – the Today’s Marketing Cookie project has multiple opportunities for prospect engagement and participation – from the solicitation of the original inspirational fortunes, to the retweets, to the blog, to the Gaggle that helps promote the messages.  (If you follow our adventures at Mass Innovation Nights, you’ll know that we also use a tool called GaggleAMP to help amplify the visibility of the 10 products we promote every month.  Members of our Gaggle have signed up to help out and get a steady of stream of innovation-oriented content pushed to them. They, in turn, send the messages on to their networks.)

So, marketing people have lots of incentive to participate in sourcing material for Myles’ blog. Meanwhile, Myles’ company gets visibility too – the people in the Gaggle retweet the link.  I (the post “inspirer”) retweet the link (and blog about it).  Lots of people point it out to their friends so blog traffic must be high. The site uses a nifty pop-up to interact with visitors to the site. The material is easily sharable.  In other words, no one has to work very hard to be involved, except maybe Myles, and you could argue that we’re making daily blogging easier by acting as his crowdsourced Muse.  Everyone wins.

  • When you create your content strategy, how are you involving your prospects? Is there a benefit for them to participate? Is it easy to participate?
  • Does everyone understand what they need to do to participate?
  • Have you created an easily perpetuated methodology that allows for flexibility? (Myles could go on to tea bag fortunes or some other similar device if he ever runs out of fortunes — doubtful, though.)
  • Do you already have a community? One big enough to make this strategy work?  (This strategy might be difficult to implement at first if Myles was a complete unknown.)
  • Is the content of interest to your prospects? Is there a natural affinity?
  • Have you put in place the tools to make sharing easy?