Meet Luke Heffron, Head of BRANDIRECTions

Meet Luke Heffron, head of BRANDIRECTions

We sat down recently with Luke Heffron, vice president of integrated marketing at SG360°, to learn more about how BRANDIRECTions solves real problems facing today’s marketers. Read how Heffron helps clients answer the tough questions about how to best reach their existing clients and new prospects.

Q: What are the biggest challenges facing marketers today?

A: HEFFRON:
From my meetings with SG360°’s clients around the country, three themes keep coming up.

1. Focus – with so many channel options these days, how do marketers coordinate their contact points and frequency in a truly strategic process versus reactive executions?
2. Accountability – we all know marketing dollars are not as free flowing as in the past. Marketers need to track the return of each market channel and the ultimate goal of that particular delivery.
3. Appeal – the amount of push marketing has dramatically increased with every new available channel. More noise hasn’t equaled better customer response. Standing out in a crowd now requires more intelligence and not necessarily more horsepower.

Q: How does SG360°’s BRANDIRECTions help solve those pain points?

A: HEFFRON:
BRANDIRECTions helps our clients take a step back and look at a more strategically enhanced approach to the entire lifecycle marketing process. That starts with going back to the basics. We start by asking clients four critical questions about their marketing communications:

1. Are you sure that your message is being conveyed as effectively as possible?
2. Are you sure your message is getting to the right audience every time?
3. Are you certain your message is getting there at the right time?
4. And, do you know it’s being delivered in the most effective channel(s)?

Our clients trust us to help them objectively answer the tough questions about how to best reach their existing clients and new prospects. Every message we produce is with the intent of delivering the highest possible appeal and relevance to the individual who matters most to them — our customer’s customer.

Q: Can you share a BRANDIRECTions client example?

A: HEFFRON:
One client has a quarterly product offering a direct mail piece that is fairly large volume. This mailing is a critical revenue driver and has not changed too much over the past few years. Aside from testing varying offers and typical A/B testing, they pretty much stayed the course. They were kind of stuck.

Through a proprietary scientific based method of pretesting across a national, demographically selected panel, we were able to present multiple iterations of design, layout, copy, offers and overall tone of the message in a single test. We accomplished this in a fraction of the time and cost it would have taken through any other means.

The client was then able to objectively choose a test mailer that was a composite of the research panel findings. We ultimately delivered the strongest potential design to test against the current control mailing.

The result was a significant lift in response across multiple client segments. And the other great news is that we now have a knowledge base of the pretest results and the actual mail responses that we can leverage into a more empirically based pre-test for the next round.