I’m running a series of case studies over the next few weeks to take you inside the world of marketing and give you a backstage pass to the information and strategies we (at Grow Disrupt) use when working with clients.
This Week:
Getting Attention in Today’s Marketplace with Will.
When Will first called us, he hadn’t even opened his Houston-based mobile tire franchise yet.
He’d invested a good amount of money into purchasing a larger-than-normal territory in this franchise, walked away from a cushy six-figure job and he was already facing the anxiety most small business owners recognize at some point: “Will this work? Did I make a mistake? What do I do to get the phone to ring?” At the time of our first call, he wasn’t convinced that the marketing supplied by the corporate office was strong enough to support his extended territory and that, compounded with the number of franchisees struggling to get their business off the ground, left him searching for another solution.
He needed cash-sensitive marketing strategies.
We knew from the get-go that, on top of being a small business, this client was also paying a large chunk of their revenue to the corporate office in franchise fees, so we had to leverage money-smart strategies.
We started by researching the target market.
We wanted to understand who would resonate with the brand provided by the corporate office, and who these buyers were: what they thought about, and what kind of content on our part would get their attention. We quickly realized that the ideal clients (who would happily pay extra for a premium service to come to them) thrived on feeling important.
Instead of following the corporate recommended messaging of “Save time, we come to you!” We focused on communicating “You matter, your time matters, you shouldn’t be wasting it in a tire shop!” Every design we put out, whether it was for an ad design in a little-league sports park, to the handouts Will distributed at networking events, were built around making the viewer feel like our clients were special.
Primarily, we focused on Will’s outgoing networking strategy
There were a few additional strategies employed, but we discovered that Will’s networking drove prospective buyers into our social network more than radio ads or billboards. From there, message-driven social media content got the phone ringing and kept the vans moving.
The Social Content:
To make that social content work, it was imperative that we understood what our prospects were thinking and what they needed to hear from us to feel comfortable calling for service.
For most of us, changing our tires is the last thing on our minds. So although we did use tire content, we ran research so we could create content to answer the questions our target market was already thinking about. From there, we found unique ways to relate them to tire service.
For example…
Our Target Market turned out to be mostly men with sports cars, who practice their golf on the weekends. We know they’re looking for golfing content, so we created an article discussing how to improve your golf-swing through practice and analysis. And at the end, we paired it with a quick reminder to analyze your tires for “these three key indicators” that the tread was wearing thin and needed to be replaced. It became a great way to align with how our prospect’s brains were already thinking, add value, and connect them to our services.
Our mantra became, “If people aren’t thinking about buying tires, how do we help them think about buying tires so they take action before they absolutely need it?” It required us to get creative! To constantly analyze what was working, and what wasn’t. To design marketing that appealed to that target market, but most importantly, to thoroughly understand that target market first!
The awesome result was that Will’s phone began ringing 5-10 times a day with prospective clients, and is the proof that Target Marketing is the most effective way to do Marketing!