In this edition of Holiday Marketing Bootcamp, we’ll take a look at a simple, effective idea to create something special for the Holiday Season.

Last week we looked at an idea that was focused on connecting with people beyond your doors. Reaching them at home, on the road, online, etc.

This week’s post is all about giving your customers, who’ve already made their purchase, something special; something to talk about.

Many retail businesses during the Holidays offer various promotional deals. From donating to a local non-profit, to high-end gift-boxes. Everyone is looking for ways to make shopping more convenient, and to put their store at the front of shoppers minds as the destination for all of our gift needs.

In a future post, we will look at what products we can stock that will help with the holiday shopping influx, but today I want to tell you OUR holiday marketing success story.

Take it to the next level.

Several years ago, when we were just starting out, we brainstormed different gift-wrapping ideas, and realized that the options out there seemed either too expensive or too time consuming for us. We were a new store, we didn’t know our customers that well yet, and we wanted to try something different.

Rather than just do the same old thing everyone else was doing, we did some research and discovered that buying a couple hundred cotton bags in a holiday color and adding a custom-design, printed by a local print shop, would not necessarily be cheaper, but we figured it would turn heads and start a conversation. It would create a longer lasting product, enforce our brand image, and identify us in the community as trend-setters (note: this was a couple of years before just about everybody started giving away reusable bags).

We picked a medium size bag – not too big, not too small. It didn’t fit every purchase, but worked well for most. We used it as our version of gift wrapping, our thank you to customers. We also sold the bags for people who wanted more than one. We made sure we ran out before the Holidays – we didn’t want leftovers next year. This was supposed to be a one-time deal, after all.

This marketing idea started many conversations around sustainable products and the environment, and helped to raise the profile of our store significantly. I still see people walking around with those bags, using them to carry their lunches, while grocery shopping, etc.

We repeated the idea the next year, but we didn’t even come close to getting the same reaction from our customers. Some marketing ideas are like flash mobs, they work well, and then dissipate.

Now, taking this same idea and running with it in 2012 may not have the same impact. Many households today are inundated with reusable bags. Really, the point is that if you think a bit outside the norm and come up with a fresh idea, it can lead to great results.

Seth Godin wrote a book about this called Purple Cow. The concept of using head-turning ideas to attract customers.

A Challenge to You

What could be the head-turning idea for your shop this holiday season?

What could be a simple, inexpensive marketing promotion that will come as a surprise to your customers? A delight they didnt expect. It should be an add-on to the product you’re selling. It shouldn’t take away from your core products, but enhance the customer’s experience and make people feel closer to your brand.

Ho, Ho, Ho… Ready to kick off the Holidays? You will be.

It’s almost here, friends! Put some tinsel in your hair, because I’m ready to celebrate with all of you happy retailers this merry season.

Alright, just like everyone else, we’re moving the beginning of the “Holidays” earlier into the year, so, the upcoming posts – each Friday for the next few weeks- are meant to help prep you for this season, so we kind of have to start early.

Welcome to: Holiday Marketing Bootcamp Part 1

In today’s post, I want to share a promotion we worked with over the last two holiday seasons at Einmaleins.

The idea is pretty straight forward:

Celebrate gift-giving by creating a countdown, you can use the 12 days of Christmas or the Advent Calendar – which is a German tradition of opening a little door each day in December leading up to Christmas.

Promoting your product through the big, tempting, ‘percent off discount sign’ is evil work. You will lose that battle to Amazon and Walmart. So, you gotta find a way to promote your product, and what if times are a bit tight, and the product you have to sell is not the latest iPhone? You gotta find a way of making regular, amazing, but everyday items shine.

Now, this promotional idea can manifest itself a thousand different ways in your store. One year we painted big white window frames, 24 in all, for each day before Christmas, onto the windows (but I should let Trixy tell you more about that).

You could also create a special display, rotating each day to the new product you want to highlight.

I wanted to create something that would bring people into the store, because I found that once they were in the door during the Holidays, making the sale was simple. For the last couple of years we created a specific website for the event and promoted a unique product every day during the Holidays. We registered Holidayadventcalendar.com and produced short videos for a blog announcing the product and offered an online shop for direct purchase. Now, the online shop didn’t take off for us, but people did watch the videos on Youtube and emailed us with questions about the product. This not just sold our product, but also raised overall awareness of our store.

This idea has many facets and is easily adapted for any retail store.

You might already have a blog or an email newsletter, which you could use for that purpose. You could start with a weekly featured product (daily can be stressful) during the Holidays. I highly recommend pre-recording the videos, so you have a few on the bench and can easily post them, perhaps even preschedule them to keep the flow steady. Or, skip the time-consuming video production and just take a photo of a product with your iPhone each day and post it to Facebook, with a sale price. How this can be adapted for Foursquare I will take about in a later post.

Bonus:

Since we did online videos, we added a few LIVE shows during the Holidays. We used Ustream.tv or Vockle.com and announced the live event on Twitter and Facebook. Those live events were, early on in the season, a huge hit with people drinking their coffee on a Saturday morning and asking us questions on what to give to Uncle Jim and Aunt ‘what’s-her-name’. We had fun running around the store, picking up products, and holding it up to the webcam. We were able to put product on hold right there for customers and they came in later that week to complete the purchase.

Marketing is as simple as telling your story.

When Einmaleins opened, one of the products we carried were reusable metal SIGG water bottles. They sold like hot-cakes. We really lucked out, and caught a trend without even trying. Everyone at the time were talking about the dangers of plastic water bottles and BPA. This new “eco-trend” was just beginning to take hold on the West Coast. The media had jumped all over it. Sigg bottles were on Oprah, The Today Show; everyone was talking it, and we were the only place in our town selling them. Home run! They were selling like gangbusters. That one product kept us alive for the first year, almost entirely on its own.

Luck? Sure, to an extent. Those moments are hard to replicate, especially if you have to rely on Oprah to promote your product.

As time progresses, the Oprahs of the world lose some of their power. Not every person is glued to the TV, or watching the same shows. People’s attention is pushed in various directions and we receive information from many sources, and increasingly the most powerful recommendations are from people we trust. Not Oprah, but our friends.

Nowadays, if you see that a friend is listening to a band on Facebook, you check them out too. You ask on Twitter for restaurant recommendations or to find out who is the best plumber in town. This social recommendation even beats Google searches. If your friends answer, they provide context. Context no other source can ever bring you. Based on years of friendship, shared times together, and trust.

Context: the difference between a successful product and a Ladenhüter*

*German for shelf warmer or slow seller

If you miss out on trends, and fail to create context for your product, it will fail to sell. Of course, some are obvious and you can plug right in and ride the wave. Santas will only sell during the Holidays. Fly-fishing equipment will sell better in close proximity to place where you can actually catch fish.

So, how will you create context and not just content for your product?

Promoting your product, writing press releases and creating your own marketing is the first step in getting the product out the door. But it’s context that sells it.

As Facebook becomes the mainstream marketing outlet for many small businesses without a real advertising budget, this poses an interesting challenge.

I am “following” and “liking” almost every business in my region and I am seeing lots of business owners, or their kids, or whoever is in charge of updating their feeds, struggle to come up with great content to post, and most fail to create context.

Context starts by engaging with your community.

Find out what your community cares about and care about it too. You are part of the community, and there are events happening in your neighborhood. Let your customers know about them. Causes are easy one to align yourself with. Politics can be complicated, but if there’s a local planning decision that affects your neighborhood, it can be a great way to show you care.

It can also be as simple as posting about weather changes and reminding people to prepare.

How can we utilize this powerful marketing tool without corrupting friendships?

Many business owner are afraid to talk about anything else then their product. Yes, this can be a tricky road to walk on. How involved do you get, what do you want to be known for? You have to always be authentic, gauge and measure time and investment. Be yourself and remember that behind every social connection is a real person.

There is no such thing as too much tweeting or updating Facebook about a product you are super-excited about. It’s important to know when to turn it off, however, going to Thanksgiving dinner and selling your service to your aunt might not get you the turkey. Use discretion.

Marketing is most of all story-telling.

No matter where you opened your business – whatever neighborhood, city, or town; you are part of a story. You’re connected to your community, and you rely on it. In a time when competition doesn’t just comes from the mall, but from all over the world via the internet, connecting to the community immediately around you is the most powerful way to create context for your brand. Your business is leaving a mark on your community whether you like it or not. This is a good thing, if you harness it.

Be proud of it, and use it to promote your community AND your business.

How LivingSocial Burned our Burgers

Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with the owner of a popular local burger joint who recently ran a LivingSocial promotion. I interviewed him in order to get some insight into how the deal worked out for his business.

Although I’ve made my feelings pretty clear on what I think about marketing tools like Groupon and LivingSocial in recent posts, I wanted to keep an open mind and get the perspective of a local business that tried it out.

First off: Yes, LivingSocial sold a ton of the coupons for the local restaurant, and yes, lots of people came in and used them.

But, there are a lot of buts.

In the lead up to running the deal, LivingSocial’s editor was supposed to present the art and copy of the promotion that was going to run. The copy ended up being inaccurate, and the pictures were just basic stock photography. So bad in fact that the owner ended up taking it upon himself to shoot photos and write copy. One of the big draws of these daily deal services is that you don’t have to do all the work yourself, LivingSocial clearly failed on this point.

Another important thing to remember is that because LivingSocial and Groupon are trying to make money with their services, they will try more and more to automate things, meaning some of their biggest selling points, like custom curated art and copy, will fall off the table.

The other big selling factor was the low number of deals that would actually be redeemed by the people who bought the coupons. This is kind of a strange aspect of the sales strategy of these companies: the acknowledgement that the coupons are purchased but not all redeemed. This can work in your favor, of course, as you receive the money and hopefully don’t have to hand over the goods.

The burger stand ended up passing the number that LivingSocial claimed would be redeemed over the course of the entire promotion, in just a couple of weeks. He also noticed that, for some reason, LivingSocial actively sent emails out reminding people that they should redeem their coupons.

That wasn’t the only number that surprised the restaurant owner (and supposedly the LivingSocial representative, who as soon as the deal was over, wasn’t available in person anymore, but only via email). The number of coupons purchased also far exceeded the number LivingSocial estimated. Another aspect to remember when considering running a daily deal.

The check from LivingSocial barely made it in time, and only after my burger slinger had to contact them twice asking about it. This was a really important point for him, as he explained it, the entire deal was one huge accounting nightmare for him and will have consequences on their books for months to come.

Now the toughest part. The customer interactions.

The stories of folks who purchase the coupons time and time again seem to all fit, unfortunately, into the same mold: Customers that are overly picky, barely ordered over the coupon total, and are really just there to bargain hunt. They get the deal and are never to be seen again. The kind of people who complain that the place is too expensive, even with the coupon.

LivingSocial offers customer feedback options, and the merchant has access to the reviews, but he has no way to respond to any of the comments left. Luckily those comments are currently only available in the backend and are not seen on the main website.

Although my restaurant owner said that LivingSocial was an interesting marketing stunt and he didn’t completely hate it, he did say that he certainly wouldn’t do it again because it turned into a logistical nightmare that was too costly and had no apparent benefit other than driving people to his stand one time, AND at below cost.

My feeling is that LivingSocial is completely misjudging how much local business owners care about our customers. Sure, it sounds exciting to get access to a marketing opportunity that doesn’t cost anything upfront and is currently being talked about all over the media, but this sexiness comes at a high price. And the longterm benefits seem to be none-existant.

Steve Jobs, age 56, lost his fight with cancer earlier this week. As the tech and business worlds takes time to grieve, and hold a moment of silence, it is becoming clear how big of an influence he was on so many areas of our lives.

I wrote my personal story and observation on my blog. A few weeks ago, shortly after Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple, Brandon Rosage and I recorded a podcast in which we share some of our personal memories of Apple and how the company, and Jobs’ philosophies about life, shaped our own.

Jobs started out not unlike you and I and so many others: small, but he took his dream of building computers and turned it into the most valuable company on the planet. Apple may be huge now, but there are still many lessons, as small businesses, we can learn from.

Without further ado, the seven lessons from Steve Jobs

1. Stay true to your passion; have a clear mission.

Business and entrepreneurism is about more than just the almighty dollar. Create a soul, a feeling, an emotional connection for your business. This can manifest itself in a tagline : Just Do It, Be All You Can Be, Think Different, or it can be something private you don’t share with your customers.

2. Love your product; inspire your employees to love your product.

You can tell that Steve Jobs actually used Apple’s most successful products. The products he didn’t care as much about didn’t make it very far and were neglected. Ping and AppleTV come to mind.
When working at Starbucks, I was always surprised that the company hired people who didn’t like coffee. Don’t let that happen to your business. The people you bring onto your team need to have the same passion about your product as you have. Apple employees in their retail stores are passionate and excited about the product. They love showing off their software and hardware, answering questions and helping you navigate your purchasing decision. They make you feel special when shopping for their products. The same exact way Steve Jobs created special moments during product announcements. His attitude and love trickled down through the company.

3. Demand excellence.

Steve was known to be a tough boss. He had high demands on his employees, even his VP’s. He also backed that up by demanding the same from himself. Tirelessly working for the company, only he could ask for such a level of allegiance, and only a founder/CEO can make this demand in a way that people will follow.

4. Don’t be afraid to change the roadmap.

Apple first built computers, later they dropped the “Computers” from their business name and now are just Apple Inc. Most of their revenue now comes from post-PC devices. Steve, known for many bold statements, was never shy about changing his mind and coming back to announce a product he initially said would never be built.
Here in my town, I recently talked to a long-term retailer who, I found out to my surprise, had changed her product assortment and direction several times over the years, letting the business grow with the customers. This change can keep things fresh for your employees and yourself. Selling the same thing for years can get boring after awhile.

5. Crush your competition.

From the outside, Silicon Valley often feels like a big family, and Steve of course played a huge part by being one of the “founding fathers” down there. But he always separated himself from the competition. He was never afraid of poking fun at others, and in the process clearly spelling out why Apple products are superior. He even wrote letters on why technologies, or even entire industries are doomed to fail.

6. Go all the way.

His computers were his pride and joy, but every aspect of his business reflected his perspective on design, and his worldview. The stores always looked impeccable, the marketing campaigns were always remarkable.

7. Theres a bigger picture in life.

As I wrote on my blog:

“Now, more then ever, his words, that he always hid so clever and humbly behind his big actions, shine through, can stand on their own, and require attention.”

Steve was all business, all Apple. He lived and breathed for his company. Yet, at the same time, whenever you saw him, there was a way about his words and his actions where it was clear that there is more in life than work. Apple wasn’t just his job, and it wasn’t just his baby either. He had a life, he had values, and he cared.

Rest in peace, Steve.