It’s the first quarter. You’ve hopefully had some time away from your desk for the holidays and are getting back to the grind. There’s no better time than now to start considering and exploring new marketing ideas and strategies. We’re firm believers in seriously cool ways to reach consumers through non-traditional marketing known as experiential marketing. We also believe that marketing is changing. Scratch that—marketing HAS changed. The principles remain the same: segment your market, identify your target, tailor a product, determine the price, distribute, and promote However, the dynamics have been evolving with technology, and it’s time to take the Apple approach and “Think different”.

The audiences you once reached through methods such as a 30 second commercial spot have already set their DVR to pre-record the Kardashians and fast-forward right through it. Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify and iHeartRadio phone apps are rapidly replacing radio during drive time in the car. YouTube overall reaches more 18-34 year-olds than any cable network in the US with more than half of those views coming from mobile devices*. E-commerce is outpacing the in-store experience and to the demise of brick and mortar stores, consumers can get just about anything delivered to their doorstep…within an hour. Props to Amazon!

How can you take what you have to offer to the next level and engage with your target market in a way they prefer to be spoken and marketed to?

It comes down to finding your niche and focusing on it, creatively. PIADA did this successfully by putting their brand in motion—literally by engaging consumers where they played in real life. Check out how PIADA Italian Street Food capitalized on creativity through its on-brand experiential marketing campaign developed and executed by Event Marketing Strategies.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.