Tina Maddock: 0:00

What did we promise the other business that we would do to advertise this and to maybe bring business their way? And then what did we give them to help them bring people in?

Jamie Brown: 0:14

We um started out by making a marketing checklist so that we could kind of create a roadmap for them and a timeline for everything so that it wasn't confusing at all. Um it was really all spelled out and easy to use.

Tina Maddock: 0:30

Welcome to the Natural Products Marketer podcast. I'm your host, Tina Matdock. On this podcast, you'll hear from manufacturers, retail owners and operators, and other business experts that will help you grow your business so you can serve more people and change more lives. Hi there and welcome to another episode of Natural Products Marketer. And today I am joined by Jamie, who does all the work behind the curtain and doesn't usually like to come out and chat with everyone. Is that right?

Jamie Brown: 1:03

That's correct.

Tina Maddock: 1:05

I tortured her into being here today. So um anyway, I'm sure that everyone's gonna be excited to hear what you have to say because really Jamie is putting the things together. And so half the time I come up with these crazy ideas and then Jamie executes them, or she'll come back to me and say, Hey, that isn't working like what you thought you wanted to do here. This is not working. Let's we gotta do something different. So um you're the person putting all the process pieces together, and um, you can see what's happening real time better than I can. I'm looking at reports like stock ticker tape, trying to see if we're making any money for people, but um, you're seeing like whether or not the the items that we're putting into systems are working and whether or not there's any snags or anything. Um, so and the reason that we're talking about this today is because we've talked a million times about partnering with other businesses that have similar audiences. Um, and we have a resource called Business, I think it's business partnership opportunities, um, where we're giving you a step-by-step of how we suggest reaching out to your neighbor businesses. Local is best. Um, although if you have some online ways that you can serve the same groups, then that's also a great idea. But I wanted to talk about a specific case study where we just started loading people up with events by reaching out to business partners. Um, we've talked about this a lot, but very few stores allow us to execute this from start to finish on their behalf. And uh, we had a store allow us the opportunity to do everything from the outreach through to planning the events. We have not been on location while the events have happened, but um, they allowed us to do everything else email marketing, ads. Um, and so I wanted to go through like what did we do and how did we find the people? How did we know they were the right people? And then what's happening in the store as we went, but just a little background quickly. Um, this store's been down about 12% year over year this whole year. And one of the things that we've been poking them to do, and and that loss started, I mean, they started seeing year over year trending down around March of this year, and it's a weird year. Um, I think everyone can agree with that, but um, people are hanging on to essentials, and so we have to figure out ways to help people see your services or or your products as essential and also to reach new people who just haven't bought before, don't even know you're there. Like, how can we get in front of new audiences? And a lot of times people are trying to do that one-to-one, like they're trying to digitally pick up a new person here and there who is starting to get to know them online. And that takes a long time. It's it does work, but it does take a lot of time building these audiences up over time. And one of the things that we've talked about getting a big bang for your buck is reaching out to a similarly situated business who is in front of the same types of customers that you work with, and then having them market for you while you're also marketing for them and creating a little reason for someone to come in by creating an event, an activity, or something educational for people. Um so with this particular store that we're talking about, just spoiler alert, they've ended up last month, they were up 12% year over year, when it's been a very down year. And um, they are trending to be up over this year and over the previous year before that. Um so how did we find these people, Jamie?

Jamie Brown: 5:20

Well, I think that a lot of people already know these people in their community or already have a connection. Um, so it might seem like a daunting task to have to reach out to everyone, but chances are they already know people that they can connect with, whether it is just a local business that they frequent, or if it's people that they've met at networking events, or even maybe um other business owners are coming into their store already to um purchase product um or services. So uh we have done some extra research to try to find other people in the community um that we can reach out to, but the um business that we were talking about already had a great start, like a list of people that they were ready for us to reach out to.

Tina Maddock: 6:20

Yeah. And you know, I think about a year ago, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong on this, they had a business that came to them that probably was not exactly their customer, but um active lifestyle customer who had come to them and asked to do some sort of pairing with them, and they kind of put them off, put them off, put them off. And so, but the fact that someone was interested in doing um a co-sponsored event uh kind of got the wheels turning. And finally, when they were ready, and I really think the only barrier to making this happen was the business owner's time. She was feeling like I'm gonna have to do everything all by myself and I don't have time to reach out and follow up with people. Um, but the minute that they started talking about doing things like this, they did have people from their customer base and community start to reach out to say, you should have this person, or I'd love to be part of this. Um so we started adding those to the list, but also we did a little research, just Google Maps, say same area. Like, what are some other locations in the area that we could just reach out to to the business owners? And we've got some other tools where we can find like phone numbers and that sort of thing. But really, I just said to the business owner, all right, you keep putting this off because you're not gonna do it. Let us do it, start to finish. Just reach out to these people, set everything up for you, and then you just need to show up for the event. Can we do that? And she finally gave us some dates that would work. I'm guys, we're only doing like two events a month here. And we set up, I think, three or four to start with, and now we've got more people coming in. So I think if we if you're going to look for people, the first place I would look is um, like like you said, Jamie, you you've got people that are you're going to their location already. And for most people, you are part of your target market, or you wouldn't have started a store in the first place. So if you just think about places that you frequent, your other customers are probably frequenting there as well. You could start there. Um, but the other places to um to start is to ask your customers, maybe your very favorite ones, like who do you use for X service? And some ideas of things. Like we have put on the menu meditation, breathing exercises, some education around self-defense. Um, and I think we're gonna do some hormone education. Um, and the minute that we said we have a lineup, we've got this activity, it's gonna happen twice a month, and we've got a lineup already. Then we also had other people from the community reaching out and saying, Hey, can I get put on the list? So I think it all works that way. And Google, I mean, Google Maps is a great place to start. And um I do find from other business owners that they feel intimidated by doing the outreach. So tell us from your perspective, you're making phone calls to reach out to these people, and some of them are already interested, so that's great, but let's talk about people who aren't. Like, what how does the conversation go? What do you say to them for people to start being like, hey, I want more information about what's going to happen? Tell me more.

Jamie Brown: 10:06

I think that once you start out letting them know that you're a local business, that helps. So they don't think you're calling from, you know, wherever. And it starts the conversation whether um they've already been to your establishment or they probably know where you're located. And then it was just a matter of, hey, do you want to partner with us on this? We will give your audience some incentive also to come in, which is huge. Um, for this particular client, we offered 10% off of our packages to um their the presenter's audience. Um, and that was you know big for them and also helped to increase sales for our client as well. Um, so I think dangling an incentive carrot isn't a bad thing. And then um really it was just committing to a date, and a lot of people agreed right on the spot, whether it was through phone call or just outreach through email. Um and I think there was only one business we talked to that noodled on it for a while and then decided not to um participate, and that was one out of you know, like 10 people that we had already spoken to.

Tina Maddock: 11:41

So this is really quite high. Yeah, that's a really huge take rate on that. So, and and we developed some scripts, they're super simple. It's not a difficult conversation, it's a give-give conversation, a win-win, if you will. Um, because also the things that we're talking about is um we're going to talk about you to our audience of X people are on our email list. We've got this many followers on social media. Um, we're gonna add it as a Google event on Google Business. We're gonna add it on our website. So we have a list of things that we're gonna do to sort of advertise the event. We ask them to do something similar. So we say, send this out to your group. And if it's kind of a local business that doesn't have a huge email list or something like that, we're saying put it on your personal Facebook page. Just help us advertise or share what we're posting, which boosts the algorithm, just have it show up again in your location. And um, when I talked about ads earlier on the first event, we did a little bit of advertising, but it was $2 a day for two weeks as a boosted post on Meta. And we, of course, we did emails um and that sort of thing, but we didn't even boost a post for the second um the the second event. And the first event, I think we we had a limitation, like there were only so many people that could fit in the space we were using. So the first event we capped it off at 30. I think we ended up with like 35 people signing up, but 30 made it into the room. So it was perfect um for that event. Second event, really, we didn't there's still some space limitations, but we didn't um put a real cap on it. And 54 people signed up. And that's the thing, just when you're thinking about it, everyone who signs up is not gonna come. But you know, having 54 people sign up and over 40 walk into the room is really great for an educational event. But plus, there's other people that signed up, now they know about you. And I'm gonna say it was um probably 30% new people never been to the store before. There were um probably 15, 20% recaptures who hadn't been in a while. And when I say a while, I mean like a year or more people hadn't come in. And then you're attracting also your own audience. Um, maybe people who don't come that often. They're coming into the store, but but you're kind of regulars, you're you're adding them too, but just makes them more sticky to be there. And just I think some of the other um the other the sales went up, the people started coming to the store more often because they could see that things were happening at the location. So it just felt like there was some different energy and that it brought more people into the store, which is a big deal. More foot traffic equals better sales, better revenue. Um, so I think all those things were working together, but those were kind of the numbers that we were seeing from one of the first events. And similar on the second event, there were signups, these are the amount of people that came, you're reaching new people from the other uh businesses, Rolodex, and then you're attracting some of your own and recapturing people who maybe haven't been in a really long time. Um, so let's talk about like what were all the tactics that we used? What did we promise the other business that we would do to advertise this and to maybe bring business their way? And then what did we give them to help them bring people in?

Jamie Brown: 15:52

Yeah, so we um started out by making a marketing checklist so that we could kind of create a roadmap for them and a timeline for everything so that it wasn't confusing at all. Um, it was really all spelled out and easy to use. And then we made sure that we um created email templates, social media templates along with the graphics. And we also created um some collaterals like posters, um, postcards that people could hand out at their own events um or even just at their store at the register or something like that. Uh we also made sure um that we, like you had said before, were posting the event to the Google My Business profile. And uh we created a Facebook event for the most recent event that we did. Um and we tied all up into a nice bow so that it's easy to follow in a document and you can just click and get what you need. And not only do we provide templates on how to speak to the presenter, but also how they're gonna communicate with their audience. So um the templates that they need to send out that they can use on their social media, um, that they can send out to their mailing list. And then what we promised was to do pretty much the same. So we were sending out um to our email list, uh, you know, introducing the events, the reminder, you know, that it's coming up, and then also posting on the social media channels that are available. And we did the work posting for like Google My Business and the Facebook event. Um, but it was pretty much the same content that we had already supplied to them.

Tina Maddock: 17:59

Yeah, and I just want to be a couple of things come up for me here because people have tried, you know, kind of following our plan to do outreach to businesses, and some of them stumble over the script and some of them are fine with that, but then they forget to make it so easy for the other business to bring people to the event or to announce it and just get some traction out of um whatever's happening in their business, whether it's just an online store and they just have a social presence, or whether or not they have a physical location where people are coming in and out, that there are materials for them to see that the person who owns their store or someone who has some subject matter expertise is going to be in a different location. Um, so the easier you can make it for people, the more likely they are to follow the process and advertise on your behalf and bring new people to your location. And I do remember that we received emails back from some of these presenters who were thrilled that we had done all this work for them. They were like, oh my gosh, you guys made this so easy.

Jamie Brown: 19:17

Yeah, and speaking of follow-up, I mean, that's something that we didn't touch on, but we also that's part of um the outreach, too, is once the event is done, we like to send an email to the presenter, um, the person we're collaborating with, just to get an idea of how the event went and what feedback they got, and you know, if if this is something they're interested in doing in the future. And then also from the attendees, we got some feedback, which is a great way, um, obviously to make things more enjoyable and run smoother in the future, but also to um, you know, get testimonials for your website that you can use for your marketing, social media. Um, and then also the most recent person that we had has already been collaborating directly with the um with our client for more, you know, more stuff, like they're brainstorming, like, well, this worked really well. Why don't we do this in the future? So it's leading to more um more in that connection is already there. So I feel like it's much easier for them to communicate and collaborate on that.

Tina Maddock: 20:41

Yeah, and you know, just thinking about this, the most recent uh event that we did, the presenter kept asking things like, How do I make this easier for you? Um, which gave us ideas too, because it was like, oh, well, if you could make sure that you give us these materials, then we'll be set. If there's any restrictions, like, you know, the first class, it was like we only have room for this many people because of the interaction that the presenter wanted. So just knowing those things ahead of time, which can make things feel more exclusive anyway. But I remember after the first event and we did outreach to everyone who attended, they gave rave reviews, like so happy that that happened. And can you put this on the agenda more regularly? To the point that the business owner is now contemplating scheduling something regularly with a fee because people were so jazzed about the experience that they had in that educational um class. So we it's a possible that this could lead to extra services that generate income. Right now, we're offering these as free events, um, whether it's something participatory or it's something educational. Um, and I'll tell you, I think the ones where there's some participation that it works better. So when we're talking about guided breath work or um meditation, those sorts of things really kind of hit the um nail on the head because people like to have some sort of interaction. And I think, you know, some of these classes have been for a specific thing, like guided breath work to release something or meditation to overcome past trauma. So you even have a more focused, like people know if it's for them kind of activity. And um, you know, we're gonna be talking about hormones, and I think it's gonna specifically be around paramenopause hormones, that kind of thing. So it'll it seems niche, but people have been coming out of the woodwork for um for these educational events. So, and it can lead to other services that drive revenue. But um I do think it's also just that every the um presenters have been super happy because they have been able to say they have sort of an exclusive discount for a period of time, and we do put a time limit on it that you can use their code to get a specific discount. And um, it makes it feel like, oh, I can take something to my customers that they really can't get anywhere else. So that that's an extra reason that someone would be willing to do this um type of co-opt activity. Um but but making it easy is really important. And I also love that we were able when we got the feedback um from the participants that we are giving those testimonials also to the other business owners so they can use it on their website. So, again, the more that you can kind of make this a win-win for everyone, the more people are gonna be willing to participate. And the first few events, you just have to talk to the next people about, hey, we had this many people show up. Here's the percentage of people that were from our group of customers. So they can see they're getting a benefit from your customers as well as you would be getting some benefit from theirs. Um, so the more you can just frame that conversation around what they can expect. If you do all these things that we've got outlined on our little plan here, you can expect this to be happening at your store, your place of business. Um, so I think it's just makes it such an easy sell for more people to come in there. Um, okay, so we've been through like what did we promise? What did we provide? How did we get this out in front of people? I want to hit on the ads just for a second because we did do this on the first event. And then the second event just started, it came out of the gate running. So there was no need to do ads related to that. But um, creating the right audience on Meta was important so that you don't have to spend so much money for it to learn. Um, what we did was upload a client list, like best customers over the past 90 days. People have come in and spent over a certain amount of money loading that list into Facebook and then also giving it a very focused geographic location. Um, if you're not online only, it's really great for you to be able to narrow that down to within five to 10 miles of your store for the money to be most effective. So you you load up the list, you're gonna be advertising to your list two to three bucks a day, is what we were doing with that. As well as saying, on top of that, Facebook create a look-alike list, but but limit it to this five to 10 mile zone around my store because most people that are coming into stores are it's limited to about five to 10 miles. You you if you do a lot of events though, you can pull people in from over 30 miles away, that kind of thing, but you're mostly going to be seeing people five to 10 miles away. But I think you can keep your budget really low on meta ads if you put this in front of the right audience. That's very limited in scope. So limiting it to a look-alike audience of your best customers and within a geographic space makes a ton of sense. And then, you know, most advertising systems are gonna ask you for thousands of dollars a month. And I don't think you need to do that if you're on social media enough, um, participating once a week, twice a week on these meta platforms, or even YouTube's a great one as well. Um, and then you just spend a couple of bucks a day with the right audience, and you should be able to attract quite a few people. Um okay, so that that's a little bit about attracting people to the event. We talked about our follow-up. So we have followed up through email regarding um this give us some feedback. That was our first outreach. The next is if they have not purchased a membership, which some people did immediately, um, or you know, haven't purchased any product, then that's you know, the the next thing that you would do if they haven't spent money with you. This is your opportunity to remind them about that small window that they have. So, you participated, here's the code, um, and get a discount off of your purchase. And so that's follow-up two. And then follow-up three is hey, here's our next event. So you're probably having something in the next two weeks if you've done the lineup correctly. It might be in the next month. So maybe you're gonna do this once a month, but just remind people, hey, here's our next event, would love to see you and go from there because then then it's the hey, we have the event, it's a reminder. And this gives you a good um focused audience to start emailing to once a week, once every two weeks with something that they're already interested in and coming to do. Um all right, what else? How else have we have we worked to do some follow-up on this? Or or what are you seeing that we probably should be doing that we haven't done yet?

Jamie Brown: 28:49

Um well, I'm not sure if you did. I haven't personally followed up with our client yet to get a lot of feedback, but I think you had done that with them. Um so that's important too, because you want things to work well and be beneficial. You don't want it to be something where it caused a huge headache, uh, you know, because this is supposed to be something fun and something to get people in the door. And um so that's great that you did that. I will be part of that, you know, going forward. And I think that that's important as well.

Tina Maddock: 29:34

Um, let's talk about the client for a minute because there was such hesitation in the beginning, right? And we were struggling to get like calendar dates, but um, and you have to have that. Someone's gotta be at the store because we're just not geographically there. We can do everything else, but being in the store to do the event is not something that we offer. But tell me like the easiest for you. What makes it so easy for you to do the outreach and then schedule everything and tie it off with a bow? What do you need from the client?

Jamie Brown: 30:13

What do I need from the client? Okay. So the schedule, obviously the dates are most important because that has to really match up with what's easiest for them and what makes the most sense for your, you know, customers or clients, whoever's coming in the door. You know, this particular client, we wanted to make sure it was right after a class when you already have people in um, you know, in this particular um environment was the studio. So when people are in the studio already, they can just come right after class. And it's, you know, a little bit easier for some people to get there, invite a friend um or family member. Um and I think really just um preferences after that, you know, like is there a max amount of people? Do you not want um anyone, you know, in the space that's over 45 people or some odd amount? And then do you have any restrictions like um or add-ons that need to be thought of? So for example, with this particular client, um, you know, you needed a mat and you needed to purchase that. If you didn't have one, you needed to purchase it for an add on. So just things like that where