1-888-353-5012As a marketer (yes, YOU are a marketer), your job is to keep your customers engaged. Your customers are BOMBARDED with information from all directions and so CREATIVE marketing is critical to make your business stand out amidst the noise. This can seem like a daunting task, but thankfully you have Royalty Rewards® on your side. These unique marketing ideas are easily adaptable and here for the taking, to set YOUR business apart from your competitors in the months to come.
A Challenge: Crack The Code
Wesche Jewelers, out of Melbourne, FL, recently gave away (very expensive) necklaces to anyone who could crack the code to their ‘safe’ during a special event. Other ways to spin this: Give customers one ‘guess’ per visit to crack a safe or guess a code, create a scavenger hunt for players to find a sequence of numbers to use to crack the code, or a scavenger hunt to find as many keys as possible, but only ONE opens the safe and wins the prize.
A Twist On Branded "Swag"
Last Black Friday, Denny’s sold 150 limited edition T-shirts for $5.99. The T-shirt featured a QR code that, when scanned, got the wearer a year-long FREE Breakfast subscription valued at $2,186.
If it were us, we would have changed A LOT of details in this promotion, but the concept itself is a great starting point. You don’t have to give away a year of meals, gear or auto services, but you can still make this very enticing. Heck! You don’t even have to ‘SELL’ the shirts, you could hide them and hint their location, or just give them away to the first 100 people who show up.
A Good 'Ole Scavenger Hunt
A local restaurant group, JRG Group, recently teamed up with other local businesses (teaming up provides more options for prizes and exposes everyone to new customers) for a social media scavenger hunt. Participants were asked to take a selfie in front of, or inside of, participating locations, tag the business in the photo, and tag the contest to be entered to win a variety of prizes. This idea is great for social media coverage, content to repost, and the opportunity to introduce yourself to a new audience.
Similarly, to celebrate its return to Chicago, the Tony-winning musical Hamilton is hiding Free tickets throughout the city, all promoted through social media.
A Game Of Hide And Seek
Tim Hayden (@hayden.tim on Instagram) is building his own global watch brand. It’s a competitive market, and his budget (like yours) is a lot smaller than the big global brands. Over the last three years, he has used social media to grow his business to over $1 Million in sales.
How? He starts by “hiding” in a different city, and then he provides his followers a few clues to his whereabouts (sometimes cryptic, other times visual, GPS coordinates, and sometimes he even has rhymes to ‘decode’).
Then he starts a timer and waits for the first follower to find him and say the secret phrase “love your journey”. The first person to do so is given a FREE watch. Plus, he sticks around to see who else finds him, takes, pics and gets a large group photo. He keeps track of the cities on a leaderboard, reporting on which cities had the most people.
In this case, Tim is the one who ‘hides’, but that doesn’t mean you have to. Maybe it’s a mascot, an engaging team member, or you could even just hide a cool logoed item(s).
Ready to get started? Don’t get overwhelmed. Use these tips as a starting point and figure out what suits your business and what you can execute well. The key to success will be creating something easy to understand and marketing, marketing, marketing. Make a big deal of it and make it a fun adventure – even for those not participating directly.
1.
Define Your Goal: Decide what your goal is (ie. increase sales, grow Rewards Members, convert followers to members, community engagement, etc.) so that you can design your hunt with that in mind. That will be how you will measure
your success.
2.
Determine Prizes/Incentives: Use prizes with a high perceived value to encourage participation. This could be discounts, freebies, exclusive access, a tangible item or entries into a giveaway. At least some of the incentives should be relevant to your products or services, unless you are working in collaboration with other businesses.
3.
Build A Plan: Decide how it will work, what the rules will be, and what the time frame is. Get feedback from others to help avoid any loopholes or missed ideas, AND for general feedback. Ie. If you’re planning to target a certain age group, ASK people in that age group.
4.
Select Locations and/or Clues: Decide on locations and/or the clues participants need to follow. These could be physical places within your store or your local community, or they could be virtual clues hidden on your website or social media platforms.
5.
Plan The Marketing: You could have us create a custom postcard to give Rewards Members a head start, but Email On Demand, social media posts, in-house marketing will be a big part of spreading the word beyond Rewards Members and getting mileage out of it. Make it frequent and enticing – not everyone will see everything – so make it unavoidable.
6.
Monitor and Measure: Keep track of participation rates, sales during and after, and monitor the metrics needed to reach your goal. This will help you assess the effectiveness of the campaign and make future improvements.
7.
Follow Up: After the scavenger hunt, engage with participants through follow-up emails, thank-you notes, or exclusive offers to maintain the connection and potentially convert their interest into sales. Report on the winners, highlight them on social media, and make them a VIP in the Rewards Program.
8.
Analyze and Improve: Analyze the results and identify what worked well and what could be improved. Use these insights in future planning.
To rise to the top in today’s economy, you must do MORE than just sell food, repair vehicles, or provide merchandise. You need to constantly engage your customers and your prospective customers and stand out from the crowd. These creative ideas can easily be tweaked to work for you and implemented to create excitement and generate more sales.