The NTCA Marketing & Sales Conference is always a delight, with heaps of optimism and enthusiasm for the future. The 2021 Marketing & Sales Conference Online was no different, with a future focus that left attendees jazzed about what a post-pandemic world will mean for customer service and sales for an industry in the spotlight.
One of my favorite parts of the conference is the presentation of the Marketing Excellence Awards, and the 2020 awards, sponsored by Word South, were among the best I have seen. All the winners showed stellar community commitment and gumption to overcome the challenges imposed by the global health crisis, and a new COVID-19 Response category highlighted those efforts perfectly.
In case you missed it, here is a quick roundup of the winners:
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Marketing Campaign: Competition in this category is always stiff, and Nex-Tech (Lenora, Kan.) bested 19 other entries with its “Saving Your Bacon” campaign focused on gaining virtual meetings with business prospects and featuring quirky caricatures of sales reps and mailers packaged in custom boxes with barbeque rub and a spatula. It ultimately generated more than $45,000 in new business. Yummy!
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PR campaign: Northwest Communications Cooperative Association (Havelock, Iowa) was awarded for its spotlight on local businesses, using video, social media and branded accessories to showcase interviews with business owners. The campaign generated a live TV news spot and a sense of community pride, with the theme “NDRoots.” Customer Service and Sales Rep Maggie Albrecht noted the campaign’s coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic made it “more important than ever.”
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Branding Project: Rebranding is hard. Rebranding four companies is even harder. Thanks to a lot of coordination and planning, Range successfully unified four companies under one brand as “one company, one network.” It also provided the perfect chance to reinforce its readiness to take service to the next level and to showcase the value of its coverage and technical expertise in digital and newspaper ads, radio spots and social media postings.
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Sales strategy: As life moved almost exclusively online, Garden Valley Technologies (Erskine, Minn.) was moving to a new community and expanding its services. It set two sales goals for the tumultuous year: 1) To complete 1,295 fiber drops; 2) To get service hooked up and generate revenue from more than 100 new accounts. Through door-to-door sales, print ads, TV, radio and yard signs, GVT surpassed its goals and learned that its fiber, not having data limits and being a member-owned cooperative were keys to its success.
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COVID-19 Response: Added in 2020, this category was also very competitive, and each entry is worthy of celebration. CTC (Brainerd, Minn.) rose to the top by working with schools to very quickly set up students to learn from home and helping businesses transition to online sales and service. CTC also coined “broadband in a box,” which allowed techs to install Internet without entering a person’s home, a prime example of the kind of innovation that kept us safe throughout the pandemic.
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Website redesign: NineStar Connect (Greenfield, Ind.) was awarded for a site redesign that focused on mobile first (as if they could have predicted we would all be staring at our phones in 2020). NineStar wanted the site to look good on a phone and a web browser and featured a map where customers can enter an address to learn about available services. The focus on visual presentation through photos, charts and graphics complements the hometown feel of blogs written by employees.
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Broadcast advertising: Strata Networks (Roosevelt, Utah) began the video series “We Connect Lives” in 2018, but it found new life in 2020 by highlighting Internet in schools, how teachers transitioned to online learning and how a local man built a home business thanks to his high-speed broadband. The videos were celebrated for their touching and personal depictions of Strata’s many impacts.
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Publication: In yet another impressive show of support for teachers and families, Project Mutual Telephone Cooperative Association (Rupert, Idaho) produced a back-to-school resource guide in response to the shift to virtual learning. The guide focused on helping parents and their young students navigate the tech challenges that can result from online learning, and it was distributed to nearly 1,000 local families, improving the company’s partnerships with schools and brand reputation.
Congratulations to all our 2020 Marketing Excellence Awards winners! All the content from the 2021 Marketing & Sales Conference Online is available until the end of July, so if you missed parts of the conference, click into sessions from the conference platform.
