Point Of Difference |
For most businesses, launches are important determinants of the future success of a venture. However, if you’re new in the market it’s often difficult to build that level of interest in crowds.
As a night-club owner for example, you are selling people to each other, a group of individuals that you repackaged into a group, set against in a particular setting wearing sexy clothes. You want to attract the right audiences if expecting to create a buzz, because your audience is your product. 
The problem is that if people haven’t heard of you before, they will be a skeptic about attending. If they don’t attend, your launch won’t be a success. If your launch isn’t a success, it may never catch the popularity wave.
The key is to create a story of the event being filled with the perfect crowd in the perfect venue for a perfect night out. If you know what you are doing, all of this can be achieved by using online social tools that are an ideal platform for leaking your story to create buzz. Let’s take an example of how you can use Facebook in this scenario.
The key to this case-study is to target the early adopters. These people are the first to catch the fever and are usually the most active online. If you get them on your lists, you’ll invariably create an environment of excitement around your nightclub launch. Of course, they won’t be easy to convince unless they see the value in it for them. Make it all about “them”.
Step 1: So, the first step is to create a virtual group on Facebook of a cool user group who has great parties every now and then. You don’t have to mention the venues or details of the parties these people attend; in fact you can build a culture within the group where doing so is considered a taboo. Focus on group member’s party experiences & stories after a weekend, build excitement, promote their pictures — and the fun they all have each weekend! You want new viewers of the group to think two things: 1- these people are cool. 2- The parties they go to rock.
Step 2: You want to keep updating this group page with new activities, party ideas, themes, photos and all of the things that would attract your targeted audience as much as possible. Remember it’s taboo to mention a party venue, date or time. Promote the story pertaining to the event: 1- Get people to start following the group in anticipation. 2- Get them to share it with their friends. 3- Get them to add stories and photos of their own nights out, in the lead up to your event. Remember the emphasis is always on non-disclosure of your venue or the date of your launch, though you would want to indicate a month. You may also want to promote personalities within the group as being the kind of people you want at your event. (Always create that feeling of scarcity wherever possible).
Step 3: Suggest an “anything goes” policy (within the law), release parcels of information over weeks not days. Remember you are getting the crowd excited, by telling them the story where they can become the stars (if lucky). The story must reflect the perfect night out for these people. The key is to engage them into a conversation by having them participate in it. Get them to answer survey questions online (use Surveymonkey.com) about the entertainment or dress regulations, even crowd selection, make the groups feel like they are organizing the biggest night out since the Beatles. The thought leaders, people who can move other people will rise to the top of this group through natural selection.
Step 4: You can set up Flickr, Youtube, Friendfeed accounts on the side. You can then feed the photo gallery, the Youtube channel and your Twitter account into the Friendfeed room and Facebook profile. Each day, you can favorite fantastic photos and videos of amazing club nights so that people in the group can see them. You can also bring in content from blogs in the form of ‘notes’ and tag people to the notes. If you don’t have a blog, you can setup Google Reader to pull in great articles and stories from all over the web of good club promotions and launches and bring them in as ‘notes’. Tagging people to notes entices them to read the note and add comments. You can also associate yourself and your campaign to the best club launches on the internet by twittering about it a few times a day. You can contact and interview some of the promoters of the events and record the podcasts of these interviews to share with the group. Without having to create any content on your own, you can use the above methods to build traction and buzz on your group.
Step 5: As each thought leader puts their hand up you can leak a little more information to these people only, give them more detail regarding plans than you do for the rest of the group. Remember don’t let them or the group know when the event will be held or where it will be, but you can leak details like the capacity, ticketing & how the selection process will play out. Give these people some ownership, give them something that sets them apart from the pack, it’s what they live for and you are going to need their support. Get your target audience excited about the concept of your launch party and begin syndicating this story through micro blogging, use link baiting, photo tagging and other strategies to drive traffic to the group while the buzz builds momentum. Keep building the suspense until you have the group publicly asking how they can get tickets.
Step 6: When you have the numbers you want buzzing around the launch, outline your plans. Give the group a location but not the venue (address) and give them the date. Send out electronic invitations along with the party ticket capacity ensuring the number is well below the number of active members you have attracted to your Face book group (say 600 people). Be prepared to partition walls if you have to, ensure the venue size matches whatever crowd capacity you end up with. You are telling the story that everyone has bought into for this big night out, at the end of the night what you said will and must go down at all costs. You need to put your reputation on it and come out the other side.
Inform the hungry crowd that only people who RSVP as interested are eligible to attend. Make it clear that people are not to RSVP as confirmed, you don’t want to build walls around your story that you can’t tear down if you need to. You want the group knowing that everyone wants to come without them knowing who will be there. Anyone who RSVP’s as confirmed is instantly deemed not-eligible for entry.
Step 7: If you have done everything well to this point you will have at least twice as many people that have indicated an interest in attending the launch than the number of people you have declared to be your capacity. Communicate the situation of scarcity to the group with concern for those who look like missing out. Do not allow yourself to become the door bitch whatever happens. Ask the group to decide on a door policy, have them fill out a quick survey about how to deal with the problem.
Now this is a multiple choice survey, so whoever writes it will want to make sure the group gets an option to vote for the lead personalities in the group to hand-pick a certain number of guests each from the list of people marked as interested. Most people in the group will know one of these leaders, directly or indirectly, which gives everyone a better chance of getting a ticket than your promotions team implementing a door-policy- it’s the choice I would pick.
Let everyone know that the leadership group will decide who receives tickets and these lucky people will receive text messages on the night of the launch. Messages will go out between 9.00pm and 10.00pm and it will include the venue, directions & instructions for the midnight launch.
Included within the text message will be a pin number that can be used to open a locked doorway in a back alley (preferably) that leads them into a chamber where security will greet them.
Timing is everything in this game. Pick your launch night when the groups interest peaks - if you delay, the hype may begin to wane and the result may even be a flop. It’s a fine line between getting this right and getting it wrong. Time your launch well, hit the right emotional triggers at the right time and you will see the results.
Your event launch will not only be full, patrons will have paid top dollar to get in. The marketing will have cost less than the security pin pad at the front door and all the people who couldn’t get in will spend the following week telling everyone about your club. More importantly you have already established a second tier of early adopters who all feel like they own the club, ensuring long term success. You can do it without cost and you don’t even need to visit the club. You can use this technique and drive the final surge to buy tickets on your Events Listed page on behalf of any club owner throughout the world and take your cut of the door.
Of course all of this is virtual instigated hype - some may consider it manipulative even. But again, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything against their will. If you want high impact launches without investing in promotions or losing out on ticket values or sales revenue because of freebies or discounts - this is the way to go. I’ve been involved in many massively huge club launches based on this tactic alone.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Exclusivity |
Tell the people that it’s all about them and do this on an individual basis. I am not saying that you treat all the visitors to your website exclusively; instead go for the early adopters. You can give them special offers like sneak peak to videos or photos. Make sure these are the people who get any info first so they feel special. If you do this the right way and make them feel like part of your team, this select group will do wonders marketing your event for free!
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Scarcity |
I am sure you have heard about how marketers often play with certain emotional triggers to entice people to act quickly. You can use the same principles of scarcity when selling tickets and merchandising to your audiences. Creating scarcity implies restricting the supply of the things that you are selling to create a perception of shortage. This becomes even more effective if it is bundled up with a promotional offer, such as a discount or bonuses.
Some people are indecisive or slow about making their decisions and often end up being too late. Scarcity puts them in a spot where they become more inclined to jumping for it rather than “thinking about it later”.
If they are on your lists, they already are interested in your services. Give them a great offer for a limited time and they might say “heck, why not?”
I have even used scarcity for high demand markets by increasing the prices up by 25%. This happened in an “open theater concert” that we were planning a few years back on the East Coast. It was going to be the first concert of that summer and people were already looking forward to it. Regardless of the prices, we would have sold a total number of 980 tickets for 980 seats. We decided to play with the scarcity approach to increase the prices up 25% from our usual rates for a limited time short supply. This trigger helped us sell all of our tickets in a record time and earn 25% more than we usually do from such events.
It’s human nature that people in general like getting attention and feeling important. Also a part of human psyche is the fact that people fear scarcity. For successful marketing you have to build on these emotional aspects. Another important factor that I should mention here is that if you promise anything through your campaign, then be sure to fulfil that promise. People may let you play with their emotions but nobody likes being taken for a ride.
Once you have the people interested, you can subtly convey that there are not enough tickets to go around. This way they’ll queue up to get the “golden ticket” so to speak. This creates a sense of urgency and makes people take quick decisions. Another powerful aspect of scarcity is that it can help you increase the price. If you have built the hype in such a manner that people believe that the event is not to be missed at any cost then they’ll even pay more to get the tickets. Remember timing is everything, don’t be too early or too late or it will all boil down to nothing. Final word of warning: keep your word. Do not promise people something you can’t pull off.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Pricing Strategy |
I often come across businesses that 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 won’t 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. What’s the point of going through the hassle if you’re not going to earn big profits?
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 opposed to ones who have purchased from you before. Increased value 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. It’s about building a story that has the target visualizing them 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, it’s 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 triggers like suggestions of scarcity such as an audience member posting comments on a blog about rumours 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 favours, access & head starts etc. I like to call it the Event Line and I even named my blogs after it. It’s the line where your events 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.
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. It’s got to be better than placing an ad and waiting for one ticket sale at a time.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Pricing Paradox |
Pricing your products or services well is important for business sustainability. What happens when you lower your standards or sell yourself short just to get to your markets? Well, you get to your markets alright, but you don’t leave a lasting impact on them. Take the example of a nightclub owner about to launch his first club in town. Nobody knows about it yet, and so he fears there won’t be enough attention. The better the launch, the more successful the club will be in that part of town. To create a good launch, he may have to come up with clever group discount packages, sell drinks at a cheaper rate; he may even resort to giving away free tickets to everyone- All of this for the ‘hope’ of attracting a larger crowd and creating excitement. Hope.
This may seem like a perfectly reasonable approach to marketing, and it is. But, if he can create a larger buzz, without having to lose out on potential income, why shouldn’t he? After all, a high impact launch results in lasting memories and a consistent traffic flow thereafter. The question is, can his approach ever generate scarcity? Can it ever generate exclusivity? Aren’t both of these important factors in the success of a nightclub? In the fear of having an “empty club” launch - where nobody wants to enter, the owner sells himself short. All he really needed to do was understand what would make his potential customers pay BIG $$$ and cue in line for: It may be an attractive crowd. It may be seeing the excitement and buzz. It may be interesting stories. It may be the thrill of anticipation. It may be the chance to meet successful people. Or it may be a combination of all of these factors.
One solution for this is to throw parties with modeling agencies during launch to get the attractive crowd at the venue. Next, you could get people to cue up to create an illusion of scarcity. If you can artificially create an environment conducive to what your market perceives as “popular”, you can kick-start your club from nothing to being the hottest in a matter of days. Translate all of this to the online world and your options increase considerably. Here are a few gorilla marketing steps I’d recommend:
- Target the early adopters
- Get them excited about the event.
- Get them to bring their networks to the event. Frequent customers would stay with you for years.
- Build a community. Treat them royally. Enable them to spread good things about you through W.O.M.
- Use online social media tools to share this excitement with other untapped potential customers. Let this buzz sell itself.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Trigger Timing |
See, just like any marketing effort, your emails are messages that are going out to your prospects. When mapping out your event launch strategies, you need to plan how to build hype and anticipation until it climaxes at launch. You launch just when the curiosity has peaked.
This is analogous to movies - we’re trained to allow the tension to build within ourselves when we are watching a thriller. A thriller movie wouldn’t work if they just give away the plot in the first ten minutes. Who would want to watch it through then? Similarly, when you are building hype towards your mega launch, make sure you spread out the campaign into weeks of little swallow-able chunks of information at a time. They need to take it in and then come back for more, until you launch and their tension is released. Until they attend your event. Until they buy your products. Until they get to benefit from whatever it is that you are offering.
So this sequential timeline is one in which you slowly build their trust, give them little bites of information, get them to share their needs, give away free things or content, work on your relationship with them. Here is another great analogy to think about: try meeting a girl (or boy) and propose to her (or him) the same day. How would they react? Well, in most normal cases, I’m guessing they’d freak out and would want to stay the hell away from you. Important things require the effort of building a relationship of trust. Your launches are as important as anything else. So invest the time to plan it well…
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Inside Scoop |
Using these strategies for the first time ever may seem a little daunting. This is why I always keep myself available to consult, guide and help anyone entering this business as much as I can. One thing that I keep noticing is that people often mistakenly associate these triggers with volume. Let’s suppose you host a special event for 10 people and manage to attract 20 people with buying intent, you can apply these strategies as is. At less fortunate times, the last thing you want is to shoot for is 20 people, plan an event and venue for 20 people and only attract 10 buyers. The entire event will be a notice to the 10 attendees that if they pre purchase a great experience that is promoted to include 20 interesting, entertaining guests they may well be short changed with just 10 others in attendance. It will be very difficult to entice these same 10 people to trust you again. Here’s the good news. Revolving door technique, clever planning and applying the same emotional triggers to an event for 5 people or 5000 will yield the same effect; i.e. the growth of you as an event marketer in reputation, and the growth of your business promoting any event. Whether you have 5 people walk away from your first event or 5000, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have built a positive platform to promote the next event, one step at a time
I’d like to enlist a few additional tactics and pointers for effective mental triggers
1- Celebrity endorsements. These instill a feeling that everyone is talking about the event. That’s a key element as an initial trigger because people generally like to be involved with popular things around them.
2- To use your influence you must;
- Make an inspirational appeal that displays emotion
- Consult prospects about your appeal
- Form Coalition partnerships
- Build teams of support throughout these coalitions
- Encourage a sense of greater community across these coalitions using personal magnetism and charisma as the draw card
3- Thoughts leaders: You need to leverage off thought and industry leaders so that your message is being relayed through their voice. This acts as endorsement and those people have a greater outreach. People want what they cannot have. Well-known yet inaccessible people carry more weight in their words…
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The Social Traffic “Soul Searching” Contest for Teams |
Friends, how much nerve do you think it takes to participate in new initiatives? How much do you think it takes to run organizations? Now, multiply that to a thousand. That’s how much it takes to pioneer new business models that span across the globe and will be used for years to come. Pioneering new models puts you in the league of inventors and thinkers.
When you’re walking on a path, you sometimes forget to notice the bigger picture. You’re so busy enjoying the journey that you forget how far you have come. I believe Social Traffic is at such a turning point.
Friends, please don’t forget where we started. Don’t forget that out of 500 people we screened and filtered and washed and fought down to 20. Twenty remarkable people with sharp business acumen, might I add. After months of posts, discussions, notes, waves, exercises, meetings, videos — 20 people were left standing. Out of 20, perhaps 10 would enjoy the summit of success. These top people know what it takes to lead.
Today, we are at the brink of a huge launch. Things are looking up. Your time, sweat, tears and exertions are finally going to pay off. This is the time to move things up and etch your name on Social Traffic’s history for all times.
We have a Hollywood videographer wanting to make a movie about Social Traffic’s journey. About how it started, and then wave after wave led to where it is now. About how people who have never met in real life can come together and work in this fashion without even getting paid for it. This is the new model that I was referring to. I call it the passion-driven business model. The biggest success of Social Traffic is how we managed to bring together all of these wonderful people, who worked towards a common goal without any monetary compensation for months, with the only motivating factor being passion. A relentless passion to make a difference. If this videographer’s dream to shoot this movie happens, he will be visiting all of the individuals who stuck through Social Traffic (Australia, USA, Philippines, India, UK, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, etc) to interview you all to talk about this model… and to talk about your passions.
Friends, I have met many great people through Social Traffic. Some have been with us ever since the first day - I like to call them the originals: Dino, Anne, Jonathon, Rebbecca, Lisa, Andrew, Axel, Peter, Dave to name a few. They are our pillars. Then we were fortunate enough to get more people to join. There are so many that I can’t take all the names, but I have to point out others like Doug, Karen, Steve and Neil who are like shining stars for Social Traffic right now. All of the names that I have taken are just a few from the many who have helped shape Social Traffic and take it where it is now. Nobody’s efforts are going unnoticed, so if I haven’t taken your name here don’t take it personally. This is just a limitation of words, nothing more.
Just like all of our activities have been about building a circle of trust, now is the time for you take the beacon forward. Build your circles. Build your teams. Show us what you’ve got.
We have earned each others respect. We’ve seen what you’ve been through. So please don’t hesitate when building your teams. Nobody is here to judge anyone. The winners will automatically shine through. Don’t hide behind cover. We know who is planning on leading teams for this contest, we just hope you can come in and add your team’s list now. Don’t shirk it for the last minute, and definitely don’t be afraid. Just choose wisely, and stand tall to honor and defend your decisions.
Friends, don’t forget that Social Traffic has been formed on the codes of honor, respect and support. You have two choices: you can either live your life in constant fear: Somebody will rip you off, somebody will copy your work, somebody will break into your house, somebody will steal your code, somebody will bad-mouth you, you will fail in an attempt to shine publicly etc. Fear and good business can’t go together. OR you can live your life with a positive attitude and consider everything and everyone an opportunity to strive for better. Remember, if it were easy everyone would be doing it… and it wouldn’t be something remarkable to achieve. Challenges that demand you to put something on the line is what makes us better.
This, my friends, is an opportunity for you to excel. This is an opportunity for Social Traffic to become a legend. What the heck, give it a try. In fact, give it a nice good push. And we’ll all get to see the results in the end.
It is time for you to come out of the shadows into the shining light. Here’s a link to the spreadsheet. Add your team there - don’t miss this opportunity.
I’m going to highlight some of the important aspects of the contest in my next post.
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Trigger Types And Effects |
Even in our revolving door strategies, we’re guiding the prospect through a step by step cyclical process of launching using mental triggers to help prospects make their buying decision based on impulse or need, or a combination of both.
Sometimes when you are online, you’ve already made up your mind to make the purchase and have the urgency of buying right away. This is sort of like an impulse buying decision when you are not looking for information about the product and price isn’t an issue. You want it NOW. Like if you have decided you want to go to a new city for New Years with friends who have already booked. Someone raises the concern that the whole city is booked out, that you may not be able to get accommodation. You jump online with the intention of booking the first place you find. Your credit card is on the keyboard, price is not an issue at all, the only thing on your mind is, please God, let there be a bed. Now you may book the first bed you find without ever knowing how many other beds were available. It didn’t matter to you when in this mind set. On any other day you will have shopped around for the best deal…
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Relaunches & Mini-Launches |
To keep up with today’s pace - businesses are like revolving doors for launches. You’ll notice how they’ll go through an extensive hype building pre-launch campaign, and then finally launch; only leading to another re-launch or special mini-launches. If event marketing and launching is dominated by ‘a survival for the fittest mindset’ - then this technique is truly going to benefit you a lot. I call it the ‘revolving door technique’ because; just like revolving doors go round and round, marketers can keep launching and re-launching events.
A typical event goes through a standard hype cycle, where the launch is usually at the peak of the hype curve. Slowly, after the event, the hype wanes and fades away with time and only becomes a fragment of people’s memories. What we recommend to our clients is to always keep ahead of the game. Always be on your audience’s or client’s minds…
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