You don't need a sophisticated ad program on a 3rd party daily deals website to gain traction with your local customer base. If you have a physical storefront like a dry cleaner, restaurant, bakery, coffee shop, or auto repair shop, you want a loyal, repeat customers.. right?
Here are five easy ways to get started:
1. Use online registration - on your website, on a social media profile page
2. Use offline registration - ask customers if they want to be added to your newsletter or sign up for special in-store offers; a simple sign-up roster or guest registry book can help
3. Embed opt-in messaging in transactional emails
4. Use a brand-relevant prize if engaging in a contest or sweepstakes
5. Use market research studies as a means to gather relevant customer insight, contact info
Pros:
This is relatively inexpensive and subscribers have already expressed an interest about you or your products/services. They are pre-qualified, or at the very least, open to receiving information or relevant offers from your organization. Growing your own list can help reduce spam complaints and opt-outs.
Things to keep in mind:
- Make sure your sign-up box is highly visible on your website (top left is common)
- Don't limit your subscription box to just the home page; make it available in more than once place and be sure it can be easily picked up by a search engine when users type in "email newsletter" when searching in conjunction with your brand(s) or company
- Give people a reason to subsribe: free offers, free webinars, new product announcements, offers from relevant partner firms (e.g., if you are a Photographer magazine and you have exclusive offers for teachers who buy software/hardware from an academic reseller like Studica); free industry research or highlights; coupon for free shipping, 50% off an item (Michaels.com); free gardening newsletter and %-off coupons (HomeDepot.com, Lowes.com)
- If you're using a contest as a means of traffic traction and conversion, track the lifetime value of subscribers obtained this way to determine if the promotion is worth repeating
Like just about everything in a marketer's world, social media isn't exactly a trend or a fad, but it too will fade into being just another channel a marketer has to deal with; whether as a consultant advising his/her clients on the strategic advantage of maintaining a presence on community-centered websites, or building campaigns to drive revenues and sales lead conversions.
The world of social media as we know it and its associated terminology like "social analytics" "having a conversation with customers" will go away. It'll be back to just multichannel analytics with social being one of the many potential channels an organization can use for ROI or KPI metrics, and social being a casual, normal way to conduct business online, in wifi, or in some collaborative medium that has yet to be defined.
/soapbox
I have heard this parable sliced and diced to represent branding, marketing, and customer perception. Here the original version from the Buddhist cannon:
Industry: Food, Hospitality
At Portland's Northwest Foodservice Show, speaker Nancy Kruse gave a very informative keynote about turning trends into money makers. This blog post is just a brief recap.
Goal: To get the consumer out of the kitchen.
How: Upscale and upmarket menu items (and prices)
3 comfort food opportunities:
- grilled cheese - Great Steak's Philly Mac & Cheesesteak; Panera's cuban chicken panini (antibiotic chicken served with jalapeno-infused brine pickle chips); upscaled grilled cheese (brie and apple slices on brioche bread); grilled cheese sandwiches matched by cheese to wines
- meatballs - Fazoli's ultimate meatball smasher; meatball sliders; meatball bruschetta; oven-roasted hand-cut meatballs finished with butter and thyme; foodcart "Great Balls on Tires" (Long Beach, CA)
- red velvet (a flavorful reaction between buttermilk and cocoa powder) - red velvet... pudding, cupcakes, wedding cakes, pancakes, donuts, fried chicken (chicken dredged with red velvet cake batter and cream cheese in the mashed potatoes), as a tea (red tea, raspberry, and white chocolate), as a martini (chocolate vodka, vanilla vodka, frambroise, and chocolate liquor)
2 breakout trends:
- oatmeal - Five weeks after Starbucks started offering this, it turned into a best seller; finished with upmarket toppings (dried fruit, raw brown sugar); Caribou Coffee competes with Starbucks in this category; Jamba Juice uses organic steel-cut oats; McDonalds offers oatmeal with fruit and maple; McDonalds was able to attract women into breakfast foods (a male-dominated category) by offering oatmeal; Corner Bakery offers oatmeal made with yogurt with flavors for summer (berry almond swiss oatmeal) or autumn (spiced cranapple oatmeal); foodcart "Bloops" vegan oatmeal; foodcart Sweetflow Truck's oatmeal brûlée(Washington DC)
- "green" foods - not necessarily organic; roasted artichokes on a chicken sandwich; pasta verde with seven greens (Italian parsley, basil, cilantro, asparagus, oregano, spinach, and peas); CPK oven roasted artichoke and sauteed spinach pizza; farmstand burger with fresh spinach; Mimi Cafe's citrus-broiled shrimp "springtime spread" with asparagus and fresh strawberries; Morton's iceberg wedge bites (baby iceberge lettuce as a finger food); Wendy's new salads (has more marketshare than McDonalds or Panera)
Easy, adaptable promo ideas:
- "crunch it" - textural enhancement; e.g., potato chips topped burgers
- "pop it" - popcorn revival; melted butter with sriracha Vietnamese chiles; popcorn as a side or a snack (with grated parmesan, cracked pepper, chopped chives, truffle oil, sesame seeds) only $5 at Grahamwich's
- "shrink it" - smaller portions; hands-on; shareable; Claimjumper's BBQ pork sliders; Starbuck's new petites in 8 varieties
- "pasta in the AM" - Sfoglia's balsamic marinated strawberry and spaghetti; spaghetti tacos (evolved from Disney's I, Carly tv show; popular among tweens 8-12 year olds)
What creates craveability?
flavor
texture
presentation
indulgence
engagement
and savvy promotion
Trends offer chances to keep customers close:
- familiar and comforting
- flavor and fun
- creative across the board
With the rising cost of raw materials, like cacao beans, political unrest along the Ivory Coast which produces 40% of the world's chocolate, and conflict in oil producing countries, it's no wonder that Nestle and other mass producers of chocolate confections are all too eager cut corners with the gold standard of chocolate. In 2007, the National Confectioners Association (chocolateusa.org) appealed to the FDA (Docket # 2007P-0085) to change the definition of what goes into chocolate, citing unfair competition by other country chocolate producers. The European Union allows up to 5% non-cocoa butter fats, like vegetable or soybean oil. This move is purely a financial one. Allowing the substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb) and whey protein instead of dry whole milk would give US chocolate manufacturers an extreme competitive edge.
Last month cocoa futures averaged $3,472 per ton, rising from November 2010's average price of $2,910 per ton. This is how cocoa is trending today and it doesn't look good for consumers or producers:
Nestle started promoting an aerated chocolate product called Aero in the UK and Ireland this year, with a $24 million ad campaign to introduce textured aerated fillings (such as caramel and hazelnut) into some of its bars. If this ever comes to the US, how much fluff are you willing to pay extra for?
Related sites:
International Cocoa Organization
[PDF] FDA's Standards for High Quality Foods
Bloomberg's Businessweek, "Breathing More Profit into Chocolate Bars", 2/28-3/6/2011, p21
I check the stats for this blog occasionally to see what enhancements quietly emerge under the dashboard and to see what topics are of most interest to random passersby. Here are a few things about all you visitors for the last 30 days or so.
Majority of page views come from the US, after that the top 5 countries are: Canada, India, China, Singapore, and Brazil.
While I still use organic methods to generate traffic, only 29% came from Google organic search; everyone else came in through having bookmarked this site or as direct traffic (e.g., you found the blog through my CV, LinkedIn profile, or from any of the marketing resources sites where I'm an active member). This is one of the quirky things I haven't quite understood about how GA looks at search traffic. For starters, I don't use paid search at all.
Recently, a lot of keywords involve SES (otherwise known as Amazon's simple email service) and all the troubleshooting inquires from using it are appearing. Maybe I should post some basic tutorials as to how to get started with SES. It's really no different than other email service providers, and generally what's in the FAQ is really what they offer.
No one bothers to read this blog with a mobile device like a smartphone, iPad or iPod, but apparently my food blog generates that kind of interest. It is pretty cool that if you do see mobile traffic stats that GA also tracks the mobile providers as well.
The heat map clicks are pretty useless. A third of you click the 'home' button at the bottom of the page instead of using the page up button on your desktop/laptop/mobile device and a third of you click onto the link of the blog in the Creative Commons license box. The last third, seems to be just the label tags to the side.
Top 10 industries (excluding party committees) that have contributed the most money from 2009-2010:
| Lawyers/Law Firms | $242,198,213 |
| Securities & Investment | $133,314,559 |
| Health Professionals | $128,357,100 |
| Real Estate | $126,922,328 |
| Insurance | $69,110,521 |
| Public Sector Unions | $58,949,366 |
| Oil & Gas | $55,357,690 |
| Education | $50,580,808 |
| Tv/Movies/Music | $46,922,077 |
| Lobbyists | $46,912,681 |
Taxes are obviously not high enough. $2 trillion in donations! See who influences financial reform at Influence Explorer.
Other sites like this:
Open Secrets
Follow The Money
Transparency Data
