Your Product is Your Marketing

In 1994, I attended a company meeting where I boldly made a presentation and declared that “everything we do is marketing.” 

The more paranoid in the room immediately thought, ”uh oh, this looks like a power grab.”  What they didn’t get was, “Hey guys, if the customer has a bad experience because the lanes break down or the food is of poor quality or the bathrooms are dirty, then that PRODUCT experience is our MARKETING.  

What our customers would leave with, I said, is the experience of the product and what they will say to their friends is our marketing.   

They never got it. Two years later they sold the company.

Years later we face the same issue about marketing where many proprietors think that our marketing is about the Internet.

With all due respect, let me set the record straight.

If you think the Internet is about how many clicks you got on your offer or Facebook ad, you’re missing the point.

If you think the Internet is about how far up on Google search’s first page you achieved you’re missing the point.

If you think the Internet is just inexpensive advertising or a substitute for direct mail, you’re really missing the point.

If you think the Kids Bowl Free program, which was "birthed and nurtured"  in conjunction with the people on our BBBI team, is about two free games a day, you also miss the point. KBF,  THE PRODUCT, was the marketing.

Our product is the delivery of coupons via the Internet to an audience that gave us permission to send it to them and it scaled to over 1.4 million kids this year and over 4 million kids since inception.

When TV and radio and newspapers were king, all advertisers had to do was come up with a product that satisfied people’s needs and spend, spend, spend as much as they could afford on advertising. Those with the most money usually won.

Today marketing is about the product. Truth be told, YOUR PRODUCT IS YOUR MARKETING

What do you think?

4 Reasons Why Running Contests Is An Important Part Of Your Social Media Strategy

While contests and sweepstakes have been around for a long time, they have taken on a new life with the growth of the social web. Contests are certainly not the answer to every marketing challenge, but they should be part of every social media marketer’s toolkit. Here are four reasons why.

1. Contests Are a Great Tool for Building Your Fan Base.   Whether you are starting with 100 or 100,000 likes on your Facebook Page, contests offer a proven way to increase that number. I’ve seen clients go from 50 to 1,000 and from 15,000 to 30,000 likes in a matter of days or weeks when running a contest. Of course this is not the only metric to think about, but it is one measure of the power of a promotion. A basic enter-to-win sweepstakes with a lower barrier to entry often provides the best option for those just starting out with social media contests or without a large base of fans in place.

2. Contests Enable You to Engage Your Audience. In addition to increasing the sheer number of people who interact with your brand, a contest provides a means to deepen the connection as well. A user-generated content (UGC) promotion such as a photo or video contest is a great way to do just that. UGC contests tap in to the human drive to compete, and they provide an opportunity for everyone to experience their 15 minutes of fame. Most importantly, when participants upload their personal content (e.g., a photo or story) to your promotion, they are naturally invested in your brand. 

3. Contests Are a Rich Source of Data. With the lure of a prize; many people are prepared to share information with you as part of the entry process. You don’t want to introduce too many barriers, but don’t miss the opportunity to learn a bit more about your consumers (i.e., how they heard about your promotion, what their favorite product of yours is, etc.). Remember that what you ask should be commensurate with what you offer in return. In addition to collecting data as part of the entry process, you can also learn a great deal from the interaction and conversation that takes place around your contest, so be sure to listen in.

4. Contests Empower Consumers to Do Your Marketing for You. How would you like to have hundreds or thousands of your fans helping to spread the word about your campaign? It is important to have a promotional plan that encompasses multiple marketing channels, but thanks to sharing via social media, contests today enable an amplification of your marketing message that was not previously possible.

Like other tools, contests can be extremely effective when used as part of a comprehensive social media strategy. Any consumer facing organization, as well as many business-to-business enterprises, can take advantage of contests to realize the four benefits highlighted above.

Before you start a contest, though, be sure to familiarize yourself with local regulations. Every state has its own contest laws — and some can be tricky — so do some research to make sure your promotion is legal.

What has been your experience with running online contests? Let us know in the comments.

REPYOUTATION

"Repyoutation" is not a typo. In fact, it probably is a better way to spell "reputation", because your business and you are inextricably intertwined.

The community has a hard time separating the owner of a store and the store itself.

If your business is known for being a clean friendly place, it is because YOU have made it that way.

If, on the other hand, it is known for being dirty, unfriendly and uncaring, it is also because of your efforts (or lack thereof).

You are the one that leads the troops, sets the stage and makes sure that all the nooks and crannies, all the details are attended to; all the while stressing that the business is an extension of your personality and your "repyoutation".

With the fall season upon you, now is the time to shine up your "repyoutation."  Here are some tips.

1.  If you are setting about to hire new people, hire friendly people, hire people that smile, hire people that want to serve. If an applicant can't look you in the eye when answering a question, do NOT hire that person.

2. If your flyers or website look like Mickey Mouse did them, hire a professional artist or web designer to make your center look good on paper, on your website and in any media you might use.

3.  If you don't like going to your bathroom, then clean them, paint them and get rid of the graffiti. And oh yeah, get better toilet paper!

4. If your machines are running at less than 80 games per stop, get your mechanic to bring them up to standard as quickly and as economically as possible.

5. If the entrance to your building is in need of paint or patch, do it and then hang a big sign that says "Welcome". On the way out a sign should read "Thank You for visiting us. Please come again."

6.If your employees do not have a dress code or name badges, get them shirts, enforce a dress code and do it NOW!

So what do you think your "repYOUtation" in the community is?

Acorns Into Chestnuts

There were 3,000,000 advertised jobs in June and according to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget,  4.7 people were  available for each job opening.

Quick math tells me that is about 15 million unemployed people.

They are in our cities, towns and villages..

We frequently talk about adapting to change and rising from it.
After all, change is supposed to make us better, isn't it?


So what are we doing to help change these folks lives?
Or maybe change just one person's life or one family's lives.

Why not volunteer our centers as a job fair site...every other Monday night or so?

Let's encourage business people we know to schedule job notices in our centers.



We'll feel better because we are doing something positive and the community will look up to us.
And our businesses will become even more respected than it already is.

From little acorns mighty chestnut trees grow.




?

Action Required

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action."                                                                                            – Benjamin Disraeli

  

Maybe its time for us to take massive actions and get  our business moving in a new direction; one that doesn't rely on "hope as  a strategy." 

The time is now. Isn't it?

Eco Logic Time

My friend, Jon Perper - a proprietor of multi-bowling centers in the South Jersey area,  took me to a ":green meeting" today involving the use of green products in Restaurants. I thought it was a neat idea and began asking some of the restaurateurs how valuable these 'green" products are to building their business.

Their responses were fast and furious.

First they all agreed that green products can be leveraged by green marketing and everybody, except for the few curmudgeons out there, would prefer to do business with a "green company" simply because it makes them feel good.

Secondly, just because they use green products doesn't mean they don't have to tell people about it. Its a unique benefit that one restaurant can have over another for attracting more environmentally conscious customers; usually better educated, more income and more frequent diners and take out people

Third, employees feel better about working at a place that respects the environment and has clear and enforceable policies about energy management, sanitation, food preparation, detergents and cleaning fluids  With all of this good stuff, employees happily pass along this information to their customers who in turn feel good about themselves and invariably tell their friends about the "green restaurant" in the neighborhood"


Fourth, these restaurants also get the benefits of being the ones people will call upon for fund raising, company parties and events because these organizations want to ALSO demonstrate their  social responsibility to their membership, employees or donors.

Gee, do you think bowling centers could get into this and make it work for them.

Please let me know what you think?

Facebook Crashes Advertising Industry Party

While traditional advertising groups jostled for awards at a recent annual industry gathering in Cannes, the year's biggest star was a newcomer to the beaches: the social network Facebook.

The company has gone from nowhere a few years ago to become the biggest single seller of online display advertising in the United States with more than $2 billion in revenues this year, according to research firm eMarketer.

Online ad sales have boomed in recent years largely because they finely target consumers in a way that print media and TV cannot match. Google and Amazon initially pioneered the trend by analyzing Web surfing and internet searches to target customers' tastes.

Now Facebook has brought a new level of sophistication to the game: mining data from its social network about users' likes and dislikes as well as those of friends to better target ads.

The stakes are high: industry insiders and analysts say brands are willing to pay more for such 'social ads' than they would for traditional online ads since they see them as more effective.

Mykim Chikli from Performics, a division of Publicis, which helps big companies with online advertising placement and strategy said, "You can target people who like golf, cars, and watches and you can start to push ads to that profile of person."
 
In a demonstration of Facebook's current advertising power, Google recently launched a social network dubbed Google+ in its boldest attempt yet to crack the medium and tap the advertising dollars it brings. 

The move toward social ads shows how the Internet is transforming the whole industry.

Major companies from Nestle to Ford are increasing the proportion of their ad spend on the Internet to the detriment of traditional press ads and big ad agencies are scrambling to evolve.

Facebook's influence is also spreading beyond its own site as more web pages allow people to use their log in details from Facebook to enter instead of a separate password.

Users can then share content and post messages within those sites as they would do on their social network, which in turn allows the website to access their profile and determine the user's likes and dislikes. Twitter has a similar system.

Beyond more sophisticated targeting, Facebook also serves to amplify traditional word of mouth on everything from new movies to the latest smartphone.

"If I have a good experience with a brand I'll tell a person offline -- I might tell my friend -- but if I do it on Facebook the average person is telling 130 people," said Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. "We think that explains the very healthy growth of our advertising business."