Buzz: How to Grow Your Small Business Using Grassroots Marketing

Introduction

The $2 Latte—Marketing Techniques That Will Really Grow Your Business

WOULD YOU BE interested in a $2 latte? Would that offer—possibly heard on the radio or at the watercooler—tempt you away from Starbucks and into a new coffee shop? Of course it would.

That simple idea—and the marketing behind it—transformed a coffee shop from a single struggling location into a highly successful local franchise with ten cafes and millions of dollars in sales.

Through my agency’s proven Buzz Formula, I’ll show you how your small business can have that kind of success with even the most minimal budget (the marketing budget for the coffee shop was $10,000, including my agency fee).

Buzz will show you how to

analyze your business’s marketing budget for maximum results;

use the tools of the marketing trade to get customers through the door; and

make more money with less.

My Buzz Formula isn’t rocket science or a get-rich-quick formula—it’s composed of proven techniques that will help you grow your business.

Over the past fifteen years, my agency has worked with hundreds of small businesses, non-profits, and event organizers. We’ve helped businesses and organizations get people to walk through the door, RSVP for their events, or pick up the phone and call. The budgets for these clients were all over the map, but the one thing they had in common is the Buzz Formula worked for all of them.

Start Local

ONE OF THE themes of this book is to start local and build from there. We’ll provide you with a Buzz Formula for local success that you can then extrapolate to markets across your region, your country, and even your continent. That coffee shop is now a chain with ten cafes around town, but they got liftoff by concentrating on people who worked within a block of their first shop.

Whether you’re a coffee shop with a great latte in a mid-sized town or the organizer of a boat show in a major market, the techniques I provide will have people banging down your door for your product or service.

But Let’s Get Back to That $2 Latte

THE $2 LATTE is an example of how a local business with a good brand can take a little marketing budget and ride it into the stratosphere.

About five years ago, a family who had decided to expand their business approached my agency. They owned a successful high-end restaurant in the city, but saw a future in coffee. My first reaction was to ask them if they were serious and why they had chosen the most competitive industry in North America, dominated by the all-powerful Starbucks. But they were clear about their goals, and, as a marketer, I believe that if a business owner has a clear goal and a great product, we’re already 90 percent of the way there.

Simply put, they said their coffee was better than the competition’s, and they were designing a space that would be more welcoming than a Starbucks.

Well, they were right about the coffee—it was great. And the space was very cool.

Right away, the biggest challenge was getting people to change their habits. How could we make them turn left instead of right when they got off the morning train to the office? Come to us, not Starbucks! Changing habits is a marketer’s worst nightmare.

With a tight budget—$10,000 total, including my agency fee—I knew this would be tough. So, as we always do, my team sat down and brainstormed. We had to find one single thing that would resonate on the street, in ads, at the watercooler at people’s offices, and when pitching to media.

We knew the coffee was great—we just had to get people to try it once. And their lattes—the shop’s best and most expensive drink—was their crown jewel. So we focused on that, but, at $4, the price point was high. Most people only ordered lattes if they were splurging. The rest of the time, they ordered a regular coffee, which, at this shop, was still great—just not latte great.

Then we came up with it. If we could make the latte so cheap that people would stop and go, Wow, I gotta get one of those, then we knew we were on our way.

Once the owners agreed to sell lattes for $2 for the foreseeable future, we got to work on the marketing plan. Curve has always believed that a multifaceted marketing campaign will produce the best results. That’s why we approach our clients’ needs by thinking about all the options: the best public relations (PR) outlets, web design, social media presence, and media buys. We love new media, but we also appreciate the value of old-fashioned methods like billboard advertising and local newspapers. We’ve worked with enough small businesses over our fifteen-plus years to know they value efficient campaigns that get the most for their dollar.

We decided to use our Buzz Formula with the coffee shop. This formula works best when budgets are tight and you need to concentrate your advertising so that the consumer thinks you’re bigger than you are. It’s a way to kick-start marketing in the hope that more sales will then lead to a healthier marketing budget in the future, if needed.

With retail launches like this, we use our Buzz Formula’s 30/30/30/10 rule. This works really well at the planning stage.

The basic philosophy is that before you start spending money on ads online or offline, before you start planning an event, before you start thinking about the PR potential, you should divide your budget into 30 percent for radio, 30 percent for TV and/or outdoor ads, 30 percent for print and/or online, and 10 percent for a contingency. We’ve used this formula over and over, and it works every time.

Since we only had $10,000 for the marketing campaign, including our fee, thus leaving around $8,000, we had to be efficient.

The first thing we always start with is the creative. Advertising is part psychology, part art, and part promotion. It can be so subtle it’s almost subliminal, or so blunt it comes off as insulting. Good advertising is both creative and amorphous—it doesn’t talk down to the customer, but connects with them on a direct, gut level.

This one was easy—$2 lattes go straight to the guts (and wallets) of office workers. So we made sure the home page of the coffee shop’s website was dominated by a story on the latte promotion. Then we created a very attractive print advertisement and an A-frame sign to sit out on the sidewalk—that ate up $1,500 of our budget.

Then we approached the major local daily newspaper—the one most people read on public transit—which offered us a print and online campaign for $3,000. These days print media are offering amazing services, including taking care of your Google AdWords, as well as your online and offline advertisements.

Next, we approached a local radio station to partner with us on the launch. The store was just across the street, so we offered some gift cards for the sales staff to use with their best clients. This helped us triple the $2,500 we were placing at the radio station for the radio advertisement.

Then, we put about $1,000 in elevator TV advertising in several office towers within a block of the store (people won’t go much farther than a block for their hit of caffeine).

Public relations is a powerful tool every business should use to increase their profile. Today’s consumer is constantly tapped into the news. Newspapers, smartphones, e-readers, blogs, podcasts, and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook magnify news stories through horizontal or viral communication. The consumer is now the medium, and small publicity pieces can yield huge results through social media.

So we had to figure out the PR spin. We lucked out. It turned out that one of the owners—the youngest kid in the family—was an award-winning latte art barista. That was PR gold. We were able to pitch him to local TV stations, where he did the latte art on location. He was amazing—hearts, faces, names—the guy could do crazy things with foam and coffee. We also pitched him to radio and TV to talk about coffee culture and the art of the latte.

By the end of the one-month campaign, we had run six quarter-page ads, forty radio spots, and ongoing elevator ads, and had placed permanent A-frame sign on the street. Our PR was everywhere. We had taken the $10,000 investment and turned it into closer to $40,000 worth of promotional and PR value. There were lineups out the door.

Marketing works through repetition, but the first step is always the hardest. Once consumers get to know and trust your brand, the next steps are always a little easier.

The launch—and the first $10,000—was just the first step in the coffee chain’s ongoing marketing campaign. The shop slowly raised the price of the latte until it was back at $4 a year later. However, the process had already taken place; we had changed the habits of coffee lovers in the vicinity of this shop. The best part was knowing that the formula could be replicated in every new market the chain opened in.

Five years and nine new shops later, the $2 latte formula is still working for every opening. In fact, people now know about the concept without us even telling them. Whenever a new shop opens, word of mouth spreads the news through the neighborhood: Get down there, the lattes are only $2!

How to Market Your Business Like a Pro

FOR MANY SMALL businesses, the glut of new marketing strategies available is simply overwhelming. Websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, press releases, events, media buys—there are so many moving parts to marketing that many people don’t even know where to start.

Buzz will help you understand the strengths—and weaknesses—of the different types of marketing, and show you how to undertake your own marketing campaigns efficiently and easily. It’s written for small businesses with limited funds. You won’t find suggestions on how to run a million-dollar marketing campaign or make a sixty-second commercial for the Super Bowl. What you’ll learn, however, are the X’s and O’s of putting together a successful marketing strategy regardless of your budget, business, or expertise. Buzz will help you grow your business, whether through SEO, social media, public relations, or advertising.

Most businesses don’t have the budgets of huge brands, like Coke or McDonald’s, but if you own a business you’ll need a marketing budget. You may think your business is so great it’ll survive on word of mouth alone. But, really, that’s rare. Even if you’re a business that may grow because people just want your product or service (restaurants are good example of this), you still need to market yourself to set you apart from the thousands of other restaurants just like yours.

As a business owner, you may be suffering from information overload. Are you tempted by the latest shiny objects—the ones that are sold as quick fixes that will guarantee to make you a millionaire?

Our Buzz Formula will help you cut through the noise and decide what to focus your time, energy, and (oh-so-limited) dollars on. We’re here to bring you back to earth, because, the truth is, there are no quick fixes, and sometimes those shiny objects are just distracting you from marketing principles that will increase customers and sales.

The Buzz Formula works especially well for start-ups that just need that initial push. However, it also works well for ongoing businesses and franchises that have limited budgets, but need to keep reminding the customer that they’re out there fighting for their dollars.

As we make our way out of this rough economic period, don’t you want to be ready to crush the competition? Get ahead of the Curve and build your business for the future?

I can give you all the tools for success, using our unique Buzz Formula to maximize every marketing dollar you have.

Sell those properties.

Promote that event.

Be the $2 latte coffee shop that’s now making millions.

SECTION 1

The Buzz Formula and How to Generate Buzz for Your Business

OUR BUZZ FORMULA is a way to kick-start your marketing in the hope that more sales will lead to a healthier, ongoing marketing budget, if needed. It is best used when budgets are tight and you need to concentrate your advertising so that the consumer thinks you’re bigger than you are.

But, before I describe the formula or tell the story of the real estate launch, I want to tell you my story: how I came to be a storyteller and then a marketer, and what I learned along the way.

· 1 ·

My Story

AS A BUSINESS owner or entrepreneur, you do work that is part of a larger journey. Most successful entrepreneurs I know are addicted to learning, because they know that if they stand still for too long, the business world will pass them by.

I got my first taste of being an entrepreneur when I was ten years old. My parents had just moved the family to a small town because they wanted to escape the busy side of the big city. So I found myself in an area far outside the city where my dad could still practice real estate and we four kids would have the space to grow up and—hopefully—stay out of trouble.

My dad was a huge inspiration for me. He truly believed that the free market society we lived in was the greatest, and, with the right energy and desire, amazing success was within anyone’s grasp, if they really wanted it.

I would listen to my dad’s life lessons about how business works. How companies make profits. How customers or clients can be found. How to close a deal.

I decided to launch my own business at the young age of ten. It felt like a logical thing to do because my parents were the kind of 1970s parents that let us have the freedom to explore and learn—and work hard—but they didn’t give us an allowance. We were told that if we wanted money, we had to earn it. Because my mom and dad had shown me how to use the lawn mower, the barbecue, and several power tools, I knew I had some skills to sell and I knew there was a demand for at least one of them: lawn cutting.

So I knocked on all the neighbors’ doors and offered to cut their lawns for $6. These were big lawns—half an acre each—and I was only about four foot four, but I was tenacious. After my first time knocking on doors along the country road, I had two customers secured for one-time trials.

Despite my diminutive size, I could power through a half acre in a couple of hours, and, because watering lawns wasn’t banned in the summer back then, the grass had to be cut twice a week. My trial with those two lawns went well, and, before July hit, I was making $24 a week cutting two lawns.

Then my business really took off. While getting those first two customers took a lot of hard work and convincing (i.e., marketing and sales), word of mouth (i.e., PR) spread the news.

Pretty soon I had eight neighbors wanting me to cut their grass. I was smart enough to know I couldn’t manage this on my own, so I asked a few friends if they would be willing to help (my first staff). I would pay them $4 a lawn and keep $2 for negotiating the deal. By mid-August, I had eight lawns being cut by my friends twice a week, and I was making $32 a week for doing nothing but manage the staff (my friends) and collect the money from my neighbors. Of course, I didn’t get off scot-free—my parents still made me cut their lawn for no charge.

Still, the entrepreneurial bug had bit me, and, in 1974, $32 a week for a ten-year-old was darn good money. And I had learned about marketing, sales, management, accounting, and PR, all in one go. Needless to say, my dad was very impressed.

These basic lessons have stuck with me throughout my careers, and they still apply to my