I got a question in my Ask Chad section from Ro Letson about offline marketing a while ago and haven’t had time to answer it until now. I’m not the best person to answer this question but I’ll see what I can do…
First let me say that I have little to no experience with offline business. The principles are the same but it’s still a different type of business from what I’m used to. Therefore any advice I give on the subject should be taken lightly.
Here’s the question:
“I have a very unique situation.
My husband and I recently sold our Quiznos Sub to another couple and the husband was a crook and was called FELON on front page of the large Sunday paper, plus a second article the following Sunday.
Bottom line is we are getting the store back any day and will resell it to someone else. But we have to get sales up because they have plummeted because of the bad publicity of this man.
I was very active with the local community and chamber. We have to have a grand reopening but what would be a good approach to take to get the sales up up up until we sell again to good folks.
Please note I will be away until Tuesday and look forward to your response then.”
Hi Ro,
There are some strategies you should start using if you’re not already. The first is to encourage repeat business and the second is to try to drive business from stores targeting similar customers (Joint Venture).
To capitalize on the customers you already have, you should find a way to collect some contact information from them. This could be an email address, or a physical address.
How to get the information is where you need to be creative…
Possibly a free giveaway of some sort (Free subs for a month) where people fill out a card with there name and address and put it in a box.
You probably should print something on the cards like “By entering this contest you consent to have special coupons and offers sent to you by mail.”
Another idea to get contact information that may be better is to bribe people by offering something like “Fill out a Coupon Card and Get a Free Drink with your Sub!” or whatever as long as it’s enticing to the customer.
Once you have the contact information, you can send coupons or other offers out to your new “List” and hopefully get them to return to your store and give you more business.
A “List” can also help you with the next one…. Joint Ventures
To create a Joint Venture you need to figure out what your primary market is. If you’re in a college town and your store’s near a college, most of your business probably comes from college students. If your out in the suburbs you might need to target working parents who don’t have time to cook.
No matter what group you target, it’s crucial that you learn who your customers are and what other businesses they are likely to visit.
An example would be something I see alot here in Gainesville (Gators!!! All kinds of National Champions right now) is college student targeted Joint Ventures where a college book store will team up with a popular restaurant. They run ad’s like “Buy/Sell your books here and get a free Pizza from *****.”
Find other businesses you’re customers are likely to visit and get in contact with the owners of those businesses. Perhaps you can get them to agree to give coupons to their customers or if they have a list of customers they can refer them to you and you can refer your customers to them.
No matter what, it needs to help both businesses involved.
Let’s say you figure alot of your customers come to your restaurant after going to the Gym next door. Get the Gym to tell their customers that they get a 10% discount at your restaurant as part of their membership (or maybe hand out Discount cards of some type to their members).
In return you put out some offer from the gym like say “Two Month Free Trail Membership!” or something.
I’m making these example up on the fly so they might not be that great.
As far as the bad press goes you have a couple options that I can think of. The first is to let it blow over. With time people will forget about it (surprisingly fast).
The second is to use it to your advantage and turn it around. You could do this with some sort of publicity event that benefited a Law Enforcement Charity or something.
You would want it to get into the paper so you’d need to be a little creative. Maybe something like a “Kick a felon day” where you advertise that people will be able to kick a felon with every purchase (a portion of which going to charity).
Let everyone think people will actually be kicking a real person then instead have a dummy or something that they can kick.
The idea is to get back into the paper, draw people in, and improve your image.
That’s all I can think of right now. Sorry I can’t give you more advice, but my expertise is mainly Internet Business.
I hope everything goes well for you…
Chad
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