Franchise Update Media asked Leejon Killingsworth, Chief Media Officer at Coyote Ugly Saloon, “How has your brand used innovative marketing strategies effectively?”
With so much noise all around vying so desperately for consumers’ attention, marketing a business effectively is an essential function to any business’s lifeline. To put this into perspective: the average person is inundated with 5,000 to 30,000 marketing messages a day, depending on their location. This makes it challenging to stand out in the crowded marketplace, which is key to do if you’re ever going to see an ROI on your marketing expenditures.
Newsprint estimates their reach based on how many issues they print, and factors in that two people will read every paper they distribute; as a business, they expect you to believe this. Radio rankings can be manipulated by salespeople to appear they are ranked higher, based on demographics and geographical manipulations. Digital marketing has started to change this “faith-based” system with hard data. Now, businesses have real numbers to look at and access to important metrics such as impressions, page clicks, engagements, and followers, which makes gauging the ROI more accurate for businesses. While this is the case, it was still difficult for us to tell how effective our ads were in getting new customers into one of our locations, until now.
In 2013, we partnered with Zenreach to provide free wi-fi to our customers. They agree to the terms and click to connect with us on social media. This made it possible for us to generate accurate customer email lists, drink preferences and, most importantly, create a profile of who our average customers are and what they like. The profile gave us the ability to target ad buys more accurately by putting our ads in front of people who share similar interests. Additionally, it provided more consumer data than we had ever been able to collect, without having to survey each customer who visits our bars.
In late 2018, they rolled out a program that expands the trackable metrics. In addition to impressions, click-throughs, and engagements, I can now see when one of those customers walks into our bar and connects with our wi-fi.
I have a true ROI and customer acquisition cost for the first time ever, and also have insights into which ad they saw that inspired them to try our products. This information will help us continuously craft better marketing messages and get them in front of the people who are more likely to become new customers, based on real data we’ve collected on existing customer preferences.
We have been testing this new technology in one of our stores for the last two months and have cut our customer acquisition cost by 50 percent, with a 200 percent increase in engagements. With this, we are rolling out the program nationwide in the months ahead.
No matter your role in the business, keep informed of technological advances and how your brand can leverage them for higher profits and better ROIs, as well as to grow your brand more effectively.