Influential Marketing Blog

The Captive Audience

We spend a lot of time in marketing thinking about how we might engage our customers to pay attention to what we have to share. In the best cases, we are not just interrupting them, but instead offering a message and content that solves a real problem. Nearly every time you might imagine this situation, though, your consumers are probably in the midst of living their daily lives. How might you change your strategy if your consumers were stuck in the same place and completely captive?

Last week as I sat on a United flight about to take off, I started thinking about the idea of a captive audience. You don't get much more captive (in every sense of the word), than when you are sitting in your seat waiting for a flight to take off. Standing in line for a necessary evil like mailing a package is another situation where a similar thought comes to mind. Yet if you paid attention to your daily movements, chances are you would find many other situations where you are a similarly captive audience - from checking your email to waiting in morning rush hour traffic. 

These captive audience moments are usually seen as a bad thing. We are conditioned to dread them. But what if you could transform that moment? The usual video from the CEO of United on every flight, for example, shares the same faceless greeting and message of thanks for choosing to fly.  What if they changed it every month, or every week or even every day? Frequent travelers (those presumably most important to United) would be welcomed with a revolving message, like a changing headline at the top of the NY Times each morning.

A similar principle drove some Ogilvy colleagues to work with Coca-Cola to create “Rush Hour Cinema” in Bogota, Colombia – where they invited drivers stuck in rush hour to watch a short film on a big screen while handing out popcorn and cokes to drivers:

The bottom line is that we may be creatures of habit, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't welcome something to liven up that habitual behaviour.  If you can find a way to do that, you might transform a captive experience into one where you can build a deeper connection with your business.

4 Easy Ways To Lose Money Partnering With Groupon

Groupon has quickly become a lighting rod of debate among many small business owners. On the two sides of the issue about whether the service is good or bad for small business – the disagreement usually comes over the philosophy of deep discounting. Are you killing your profit margin in exchange for a short burst of fickle customers who will never come back to your business unless they get a similar discount? Or are you using a smart discounting method to bring new customers in the door, who you might convert into loyal customers paying at close to full price?

The answer, it turns out, relates as much on how you choose to use Groupon as anything else. A few weeks ago at the Corporate Social Media summit, some presenters from popular website analytics firm WebTrends shared some survey results that raised the possibility that the biggest success factor might be what products or services you choose to discount. This led me to the topic for this post – which spotlights some common strategies that lead to failure on Groupon – and how you might avoid them:

1. Groupon Money Losing Strategy #1: Discount your core product/service. There are likely products and services from your business which many of your current consumers depend on coming into get. Discounting them simply offers your existing customer the same thng at a lower price … a sure recipe to fail. Instead, find products and services that have a higher margin where you can afford to lose some money initially, but will make it back if a customer gets hooked on that product. 
2. Groupon Money Losing Strategy #2: Sell a longer term product or service. If yours is the kind of business or service that the average consumer might do only a couple of times a year (such as hair coloring) – that may not be the ideal thing to offer a deep discount on because you will have effectively lost your one chance to interact with that consumer for months.
3. Groupon Money Losing Strategy #3: Offer a forgettable discount. While the simplest thing to do may be to offer a coupon where a consumer spends $10 to get $20 of spending power with your business … the reality of a promotion like this is that it is completely forgettable.  Instead, if you can tie a promotion to a part of your business – such as offering 3 rounds of Golf for $81 as a course recently did in my area – it can be much more memorable for consumers who choose to take advantage of it.
4. Groupon Money Losing Strategy #4: Focus offer on the item and not your brand.  When writing up the offer that you will present for consumers, a common mistake is to only focus on describing your offer without doing a good job of selling your brand along with it. This misses a golden opportunity for building brand recognition among local consumers (presumably a major goal of why you would do the Groupon in the first place).  Instead, make sure you try to use a real photo instead of a stock image, include links to positive online reviews, include links in the body of the description of your business and generally do a better job of talking about why your business would be a great one for the consumer to choose not only for this promotion, but in the future as well.

3 Ways To Inspire Your Employees With Social Media

As the full swing of the summer is starting up, if you are in any sort of retail business – chances are you have had to hire or release some of your employees to manage the seasonal flow of business. In other industries, keeping your employees motivated through the summer vacation and daydreaming season will likely become a new priority (if it hasn’t already). 

While the summer might bring these thoughts to the forefront of a small business owner’s mind, the real question of how to continually inspire your employees to show up for work happy and committed to the job you are asking them to do is one that you should be asking yourself every day.  Though there is plenty of conversation on using social media as a sales tool to help you bring in new customers – how effectively are you using it to inspire the employees that you already have?

Here are a few ideas for how you might effectively use social media to inspire your employees on a more consistent basis – to get the best effort, thinking and performance from them, even during the season of distraction :

1. Share inspiring content. Whether you find a great article or a powerful video online, creating a culture of sharing content which inspires you can help to do the same for your employees. Whether you use the tried and true method of email to share a link to a great piece of content, or you take the more “social” approach of creating some sort of destination (such as a private group on Facebook) where employees can watch or read inspiring content – both can be great ways of bringing more inspiration into the workplace.
2. Use co-creation to seek new ideas. Sometimes the biggest barrier to sparking innovation is routine. When employees are challenged to think beyond their roles and share new ideas in some way, it can get new creative thinking to happen and inspire them to think bigger.  So take a lesson from some consumer brands and sponsor your own employee video contest or blogging challenge and see what ideas and voices you get to participate. The upside is that some of these same people may make great voices for your business in social media when you do launch any marketing or external initiatives.
3. Incentivize employees to attend relevant events. Social media doesn’t have to remain virtual and online. There are plenty of organizations and meetup-style events which are often primarily promoted through social media in your region.  Encouraging and even incentivizing employees to find them and go can be a great way to have them learn something and make great connections in the process.