Create brand loyalty and promote longevity
A big anniversary is approaching. The number doesn’t matter as much as the nagging feeling that you should do something to promote and celebrate it. The problem: how to prioritize business anniversary marketing in the midst of other important marketing work.
Some firms will let the opportunity pass by or maybe have a nice employee party and call it good. But they are missing the power of demonstrating longevity — particularly after the Recession when so many companies do not survive due to insolvency or an inability to adapt to rapid change.
A few years ago, a professor at Yale, Richard Foster, noted that the average life expectancy of companies in the S&P 500 has dropped to just 15 years.
Now do you feel like your anniversary is a big deal? It’s a great opportunity to reinforce brand loyalty.
You don’t have to plan your anniversary celebration alone. Many firms work with an outsourced marketing group to support both internal and external business anniversary marketing. There are so many ways to celebrate an anniversary, and it depends on your goals, audience and resources. Start with a plan.
Click for Ingenuity’s outsourced marketing services.
Here are some tips to leverage your business anniversary:
- Assign a team.
- Ask why your anniversary is important. Come up with two or three reasons.
- Discuss your unique firm story and how to tie it to your anniversary with key messages.
- Create a list of potential activities to promote your anniversary to internal and external audiences. Anniversaries can be a great source of pride and engagement for employees, so don’t miss this piece of the plan.
- Discuss how your anniversary can stand out visually: with a special logo or icon, a website history timeline, photos from the past and present, a video, special event invitations and advertising campaign.
- Identify media or associations that will share the news of your anniversary. Use it to create an anniversary PR plan.
- Plan and host a few small events or one big event, inviting clients and influencers to celebrate with you. Event planning, promotion and management are time-consuming and need their own team.
- Consider a commemorative item to give as a gift to clients and referrals to thank them for supporting your longevity. You may also dedicate something for your office or building such as a piece of art.
- Develop a timeline and identify champions to carry out the anniversary activities. An activity can happen each month or each quarter. Just make it consistent.
- Use social media to share the results of your celebration as appropriate.
As you can see, business anniversary marketing has many details to consider. It helps to plan at least a year in advance of a pending anniversary. Larger firms should plan even further out to organize people, processes and also the budget.
After considering all of this, do you think you’ll need help planning your business anniversary? Get started by talking to us at Ingenuity. We’ve helped many firms celebrate a milestone by supporting planning, visuals, event development and more.
