Archive for July, 2008

Take me to water - don’t just give me another map

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Ok, so as I mentioned yesterday, I am in the process of launching a social networking website for event planners and promoters. It’s called Events Listed. We are 5 months into development and currently in testing phase.

The idea behind Eventslisted:

The main idea behind Events Listed is to enable anyone, anywhere to build rich and interactive pages and applications for their events. The website will give people or companies the platform to promote and celebrate events that they want to share by leveraging the latest web 2.0 technologies. Its a complete end to end platform with ticketing and merchandising systems integrated within it.

It will be an international social networking web platform for event planners and promoters.

My interest in this field:
Having founded three start-ups, I have a preference for working against the odds & committed to breaking barriers. My interest in internet marketing in general and event management in specific led us to creating Events Listed. The Events Listed product website launch is going to be a product of intense social media marketing and intricate product design details.

Launch Strategies:
We’re about to begin our own website marketing & launch strategy and I’ve decided to show it to you as it happens. This is going to be a thorough getting-your-hands-dirty process for the doers and go-getters. I’ll keep it transparent and free from any loopholes. So, if you want to actually get “in the bunker” so as to speak, and see how these always-talked-about-but-never-demonstrated strategies can work, then you’re in for some interesting content.

My intention is to share the entire process with all of my readers as I go through the launch process myself.

You will be able to apply these strategies to event launches, product launches or any other activity that you are planning. These posts will run in tandem with our Event Launch Guidelines daily blog posts that will walk you through an event launch process from end to end linking you off the 5 fantastic FREE web 2.0 resources at every step in the process that you can utilize to improve your business.

Starting on August 11th 2008 (4 weeks away) I’ll also be walking you through the planning steps that I have executed for the Events Listed website and product launch so that you can better understand our strategic objectives from a real launch case study perspective.

Following the Events Listed website application product launch case study posts will provide a birds eye view of how a large scale website product launch is executed. You will watch us strategically turn our product launch into a series of event launches, each marketed no differently to any event launch campaign except that our only delivery platform will be the internet. At the same time you can follow our “Event Launch Guidelines” video blog which will link you off to the latest tips n tricks in FREE web 2.0 resources presented in sequence you will be able to relate to, we will be introducing some amazing resources that you can use for each phase of launching an event from the idea through to an actual launch.

Looking forward to seeing you on August the 11th.

Surfing the Free Line

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Despite the vastness of content and information on the internet, it’s interesting to see that most of the mavens only define and outline processes while charging for the actual in-depth how-to guides and consultation. Some people think that if they give away everything for free, they won’t have anything to hold on to. Others argue that without sharing information you can’t possibly expect to build followers and networks, hence butchering the purpose of being online.

It’s not a debate of who is right or wrong; it’s more of a question of how to draw a line between giving away free information and charging for it. Brad Fallon calls this “the FREE line” - the line between giving content, products and services away for free and the point of charging for them. This line is different for different people and businesses, and hence there isn’t any exact formula to follow. However, there are a number of factors that can be looked into; such as the perceived value of the information, the availability of the information, the ROI of consuming and implementing the information, the effect of the information on the reader’s businesses and profitability, the need and demand of the information and so on.

If you do a thorough exploratory research, you will find mountains of information designed to build the reader’s knowledge to a point where they become willing to pay someone to show them how it’s done. Community based platforms or personal sites may be an exception to this discussion - we are only referring to sites with business and sales motives. There is nothing wrong with this approach; in fact it is a somewhat preferred model for online businesses - building reputation first before drawing people to your services or products.

It seems the key to success in online businesses equates to which company can drive the free line farthest whilst still remaining profitable. These business practices are likely to strip industry of high price-points when there are multiple competitive forces at play. If your company is offering services or products that are not incredibly unique, then chances are that your monetary return per customer may fall unless you differentiate yourself enough.

As an example, if a company has consumers spending $20 per day and another company trots along with newer innovative technology offering the same value for $10 per day, then surely that industry has just had is overall price-points stripped by 50%. Either that or the ones with competitive prices will prevail while the others wilt away. Sometimes this also results in stock value high-points not seen before. Where is the true value contained?

One way in which companies deal with this is by leveraging the long tail by targeting smaller niches. This is where social media networks come into play, that have made it easier to find even the rarest sub-targeted markets, readers or audiences. On the flip side, with so much free information sources out there, I wonder where the consumer’s expectations are heading? There are a number of other ways in which companies are driving the direction of this debate; but for now I just want to limit the scope of this post to the free line point under discussion. How do we draw the line for our events or business launches without compromising on our bottom-lines. After all, a business is a business and we have to pay bills or buy the fancy new iphones, eh?

Testing the free line theory - Live!
I have an idea on how to give this blog some real direction and make it much more interesting for you to follow. If you’ve been reading my previous thoughts, strategies, perspectives and ramblings, you would know that I am a supporter of intensely remarkable launches. You would also know that I have a keen interest in the product launch formula strategies advocated by Jeff Walker and other such notable people in the internet marketing world. You may also know that I am in the process of launching a social networking website designed specifically for event planners and promoters using the latest social marketing technologies and strategies. Since you know all of that about me, I want to make the content of this blog more focused so as to deliver great value to all of you while testing the free line theory.

Stay tuned, hooked and subscribed.

Event tickets - price anchoring techniques

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I often come across businesses who set their ticket prices very low to attract bigger crowds. The problem is that their brand, sales, marketing and even the event itself suffers as a consequence. The event tickets price depends on the perceived value to the audience. If the audience is not excited about attending they will not want to pay too much for it - chances are they wont buy the tickets even when they are offered at lower rates. What happens is that the cost of arranging the event becomes more than the revenue earned through the event. Whats the point of going through the hassle if you’re not going to earn big profits. Right?

If you can somehow increase the actual and the perceived value of the event for the audience, you will be able to charge a higher rate for the tickets, which if done right, will in turn sell more tickets as well. It will also allow you to draw more attention to prospective new customers as apposed to ones who have purchased from you before. I have posted before about the cost of a new customer being a one off cost, why not build this cost into new launch campaigns. Increased value that is measured in ticket pricing will also demonstrate traction and excitement around your event to prospective sponsors which will result in your ability to get them to pay a lot to get their brand in front of your audience. So, in essence, the entire success of the event could come down to the perceived value.

Think about the perceived value like this: A glass of water will have a higher perceived value to a thirsty athlete than a person who is not thirsty. So even though the glass of water is the same physically - it has different levels of perceived value to a different audience. Similarly, your targeted audiences need to want to be a part of your event. They need to feel like they belong there. They need to feel a sense of ownership and association with your event. They need to be excited about it all the way up to the event day. The value of your event to them should be incredibly high, so that they become willing and mentally ready to pay high prices to be a part of it.

The way to build perceived value is by hitting the right emotional triggers in the right audience at the right time. By engaging your audience in a conversation about the event, you are going to have more chance to hit these triggers than you would if you hand them a brochure or flier. Its about building a story that has the target visualizing themselves being in the middle of a community of like-minded people who are all enjoying an experience that none of them would want to miss.

Once you have achieved this trigger throughout your conversation you have options. A good example of this process lies in the fact that you are not in a position to introduce a sense of scarcity around your event’s ticket sales until you have your audience wanting to attend. Who cares about limited tickets if you don’t want to go? Price anchoring is a technique that can be applied as a mental trigger to bait the prospects into impulse buying. What happens when people are in a certain mode is that they start searching for a solution that they have already made the decision to purchase. They have researched it & know what they want - and so have embarked on a mission to secure it. They are on a buying frenzy and nothing is going to stop them other than the purchase itself. Well suffice to say, its when people are in this mindset that you want to get in front of them with a final call to action trigger.

Throughout your event prelaunch campaign you work on building the perceived value of your event bearing in mind that perceived value and actual value are in the same family. Throughout this phase you need to engage your audience into a conversation that represents value for them to join, you do this be serving up social proof of value with the help of your existing customer or past event community & enhance this technique through the use of some other social marketing strategies. Once you sell them on the strength of value you can introduce discrete trigger’s like suggestions of scarcity such as an audience member posting comments on a blog about rumors of limited tickets being released to the public. It takes very little to introduce a sense of scarcity once the perceived value is already built.

Sometimes all it takes is a subtle scarcity trigger to send an audience into a buying frenzy where all you need to do is get a ticketing page up on the internet. When a touch of scarcity is combined with a high perceived value you’ll get the early adopters, the effect is almost magical if those early adopters are people-movers and not followers. Once this effect kicks in you can feel it because you go into lock down mode, hiding from everyone who is constantly asking about tickets, requesting favors, access & head starts etc. I like to call it the Event Line & I even named my blogs after it. It’s the line where your event transform from being a vision in your mind to a vision in the minds of your audience. Let’s face it you’re not going to be planning an event that you think won’t be perfect. Right?

Throughout your campaign you can set a value and even a price estimate that will embed numbers in their heads without actually telling them the price. This can be done by comparing your event with other events of a similarly perceived value. These numbers need to be lurking somewhere in the back of their minds, all the while in a generally accepted manner that those numbers will be the price although you have never said so. When you have built that sense of excitement, exclusivity, scarcity, traction and pressure of a world of people rushing to become a part of it (all trigger points that should be planned into your campaign) - open your tickets for sale at a rate which is slightly lower than the number you had planted into the back of their minds (but higher than what you would have generally charged prior to inflating the events perceived value up from its actual value) - If the audience are exposed to a release of tickets going on sale at the right time they will be inclined to purchase them immediately, without further ado. Why wouldn’t they, the event is hot, everyone wants to attend, tickets are scarce & they are actually cheaper than what they had already lead themselves to believe they were going to be.

The impulse buying mode that you have worked them into, will lead to greater ticket sales and larger audiences - that can sell out in hours, days, even weeks before your event. Its got to be better than placing an ad and waiting for one ticket sale at a time.

The event launch hype cycle

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Typical launches follow a traditional hype cycle with the excitement rising up to launch (where it peaks) and then decreases all the way down until reaching a minimum constant level. Here is what the hype curve typically looks like:

Event Hype curve

When we talk about the revolving door techniques for launching your events, we are essentially looking at a curve that looks something like this:

Event hype curve

So, we have the sudden rise in hype with the help of emotional triggers and social marketing effects such as event pages and groups. These triggers are placed in such a sequence so as to raise the hype to a maximum level at the day of the event. Thats when most of your sales targets from tickets and sponsorships will have met. But we don’t want you to stop there - this strategy ensures that you have post-launch hype building and then carefully timed smaller relaunches to ensure that the hype curve always stays above the typical constant plateau. The smaller scale launches can be anything from event videos to smaller local events - anything that gets your fancy.

There is no limit to the potential amount of revenue you can make out of your events if you plan them correctly. I have been talking about these strategies for a long time, but I feel that it is now time to actually demonstrate the powerful impact of these tactics in event marketing. I am going to show you people step by step live demonstrations of an event launch in the coming weeks and answer any questions that you have regarding it as we go. Keep following this blog for an open and uncensored demonstration of the entire event launch process.

Active Event marketing

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In the prelaunch phases leading up to your event, you cannot let your hype wane just because of wrong strategy implementation. Its easy to build social marketing plans, but requires a lot of energy to make sure they are implemented properly.

With all of the different bookmarking, content sharing, collaborating and social networking websites sprouting up around us, we sometimes get lost about what to do. Just jumping in the game randomly can’t help, so its best to resort to a game plan first. The whole cyclical launch strategies, mental triggers and social media strategies that I talk about are to help you understand the road that you are treading better.

As an event marketer or manager you can choose to hire specialized skills or spend your own time to market your events using these social platforms. Someone from your team needs to be actively involved in the prelaunch process constantly. Simply having a presence in social sites is not enough as that will only get you so far. You need to be in the forefront of conversations and be involved with whats going on. If you have a blog or an event page, make sure it is updated regularly and has the latest information about the event.

All of this activity shouldn’t undermine the quality of your content. You need to offer value to people in order to win their trusts in social networks. Value is offered by quick response times, quality and your availability to help others.

Social marketing efforts spread through word of mouth. Thats why some of the most remarkable web 2.0 campaigns spread virally to thousands of people in a matter of hours if not minutes. So get out there with a plan. Actively engage your audiences.

The Pizza Store Dilemma

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How often do you see the same sad story around you? Small businesses struggling hard to survive - short-sighted and unprepared to take risks, unwilling to secure the potential future of their business. I have had pizza in 26 different countries in the world, and yet none of them compares to this tiny corner pizza shop in the Noosa Hinterland, close to where I live. They’re pizza’s are to die for. This is why I feel unnerved to see how their business hasn’t been ’secured’ for long term success. 

pizza

The couple (lets call them Jack & Jill for the sake of anonymity) took a vacant building a couple of years ago and built the pizza and coffee business from scratch. Despite the mouth watering pizzas, they still aren’t making enough money to buy the property. The property owner is stalling their lease renewal and wants them to leave if they can’t buy the freehold. Recently I found myself thinking about the possible reasons for a business that provides a great product and delivers such a valuable service to it’s customers, is not in a position to buy the freehold of the property it trades out of. Now my only interests other than looking at this as a great case study is to see them pull through - being a loyal customer who benefits from the value their store offers me (i.e. delicious pizza). I have vested interest in the business being a success. If it goes under, I loose a convenient destination for coffee breaks and an easy place to take the kids out for pizza on weekends. There will be no replacement shop if they fail to secure the building freehold which will not only effect the proprietors but will effect the lifestyle of customers who have come to lean on the business as well.

One of the core issues I can see with the business is the owners approach to business, the couple who run the place are chalk and cheese in the way that they view what the business is to a customer and how they translate this into success.

First Jill: Although friendly and personable, she is not open to advice on ideas for securing more revenue or funds to secure the businesses future. She simply phases out if you offer advice. She makes the business atmosphere casual and homely as though the customers are visiting her in her lounge room which is nice (they live behind the shop) but when it comes to money its impossible for her to hide a tight-fisted, short sighted approach to business.

Now I, for one, find the dynamic in this particular business as interesting as any I have seen before. Whats interesting is the fact that her attitude - being so money focussed - has such a contrasting effect on me as her customer than the opposite and equal reaction I have when dealing with her partner Jack’s attitude. She’ll skimp on servings, serve canceled orders to save making a fresh pizza & count every nickel and dime owed to a point where she actually makes me repel against wanting to give her any more money than I have to. Her attitude seems to instill a feeling of wanting to visit the shop less and spend less regardless of how nice it is if she is on duty. Also, if spending anything, it’s as though she makes me want to scrutinize everything she serves. Its almost as if she wills her worst fears upon herself. Being worried about not making enough money results in customers thinking about how much she is taking from them and what they are getting in return. Its a vicious cycle that I would never had contemplated if I wasn’t lucky enough to have been able to watch such contrasting styles in the same business on rotating days.

Jack the partner: A laid back personality compared to Jill with a completely different attitude to business. His attitude is to offer free coffee, give extra servings, and a philosophy that ‘near enough is good enough’ when it comes to the bill. He’d say nice stuff like “that ones on the house if the experience is anything but perfect”. His attitude makes customers feel like no matter what you pay him, you are always getting real value. He makes you feel like he is looking out for you as his customer and this attitude in effect translates into you enjoying the visit more, thus increasing your frequency of visits.

What makes this case study so interesting is the following question it raises. If the business is not generating enough money to buy the building it trades in, although the food and the service it provides is excellent value for money, will it survive? Is the business failings because Jack is giving away to many freebies to customers (although by doing so he entices them to spend more time), shouldn’t this translate into success? Or is it failing because of tight-fisted Jill who extracts every last penny from customers without winning any awards for enticing customers into spending more time in the business each week, even though she can be assured that she has extracted every last cent when customers do visit?

You can probably imagine Jill is always on Jacks back for giving away too much for too little or for being way too generous with the helpings and so on. I often see him hushing and hiding his generosity to avoid conflict. There are no awards for guessing who Jill blames for the business not earning enough money and if she had it her way, Jack would be forced to follow suite with the style in which she employs to govern the business, she sees no value in his style. You do not sense a willingness to compromise between her style and his, when it comes to the methods by which she believes, needs to be employed for profitability.

Now Jack on the other hand would probably subscribe to a view more in tune with a combination of a little tight-fisted scrutiny on Jill’s part giving him the bad cop enforcer behind him to cover positive approach to dealing with customers. Customers first. I sense that if he has the freedom of exercising his style of management without scrutiny that he would have the business pumping in no time.

Now to me, I see myself as a potential $5000 customer of this business because if frequenting the business daily I would spend just under $10 daily as well as the bi-weekly $50 family pizza nights we would enjoy. I am sure thats how jack sees me too which is probably why we are on the same page where he considers me a great customer & I consider myself lucky to have such a great value local hangout at my disposal that is so laid back and comfortable.

Now jack’s philosophy is probably to build more customers just like me that come in every day & his strategy is pretty simple, he gives back to ensure the customer experience is always positive. He seems to know that each customer’s experience is only ever as good as their last.

Now Jill on the other hand can only focus on what giving away a FREE cup of coffee means to her in lost revenue, she cannot get past the value she feels she is already providing for such a small return and she doesn’t feel she owes it to anyone to give them anything for free.

Jill does not see me as a $5000 customer, I sense she sees me as an $8 to $10 customer every time I walk into the shop and in doing so I feel like one, thus I am sure I act like an $8 customer by scrutinizing my change and what I am being charged, though when I am served by Jack I both feel and act like the $5000 customer I am.

Now lets do the analysis on this for arguments sake. I can say with absolute certainty that if Jill ran the business her way and Jack did not exist, the business would become little more than an inconvenience to me as it was before they took over the building. I personally would most probably become a $5 customer on bi weekly frequency as opposed to a $10 a day customer, buying little more than a coffee and the newspaper which would cost me a total of $520 per year. This being the case I would be $4480 per year richer and the business $4480 poorer.

What do I end up with at the end of the year for my extra $4480 if Jack was in charge? I get a sense of community, I have a place to visit when I need to get out of my office or away from the home, a place that feels like a second home. I have a place to take my family for stress-free casual dinners on Sunday nights & a place to meet business associates or friends where the proprietor is always friendly, always makes me feel like $5000 customer who knows my name and what I like to eat and drink. I can even ring him on holidays and ask him to check my pool for me.

Is it worth $4480? Absolutely, but if I didn’t have access to it my life would adapt & any perceived value would evaporate, as it does with most business services - its a want of mine to retain this facility, it’s not a need. There is a difference there. 

I guess the lesson here is that money is little more than paper or coin that is effectively worthless. It serves as a currency of exchange between goods and services from one person or group to others. Whats important is not the money but the goods and service being provided to your customers. Business is about perceived value, all a customer ever sees is your intent, the exchanging of money serves little more than to provide a common denominator by which we measure our satisfaction.

If customers feel they are realizing perceived value through any relationship they have with a provider, they will continue to hand over money asked of them without questioning it. The minute a customer questions the perceived value they are receiving they will focus on the money being asked which is the beginning of the end, of a mutually profitable relationship.

I guess the crux of this case study would be to always allow your to business to focus on the perceived value of what customers enjoy from your products or services. Ensure they keep enjoying it whilst finding others who will enjoy the same. Evangelism. Do this and your money will always keep flowing in, focus on the money and you will eventually run out of people willing to keep giving it to you.